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EpbIrep sy ALEssio LUNGHI & SETH WHEELER

Penned after the 2010 European student unrest and before what is
now commonly referred to as the “Arab spring” began to escalate,
BBC Newsnight economist Paul Mason’s “20 Reasons Why It’s
Kicking Off Everywhere” sought to establish an understanding of the
motivations behind these globally disparate, yet somehow

connected struggles.

What roles do the “graduate with no future,” the “digital native” or the
“remainder of capital” play in the current wave of unrest? What are the
ideas, ideologies, motivations or demands driving these movements?
How is struggle organized and coordinated in the age of memetic politics
and viral ad campaigns?

This collection of essays seeks to further explore Paul Mason’s original 20
Reasons in an attempt to better understand our turbulent present.

“..an encomium to still, as yet, unfocused possibilities.
Each fragment is provocative and possessed of the same energies
as the movements it seeks to describe.”

~ Aaron Peters, Open Democracy

“this book has the inside track on how we can keep ‘kicking off
for an end to capitalism and for the establishment of a global
commons. Read, discuss and take action.”

— Ewa Jasiewicz, Trade Union Organizer / Journalist

ISBN 978-1-57027-251-6

.
<.:.MinOr.:.>
-cOmpOsitiOns.
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Occupy Everything
Reflections on Why It's
Kicking Off Everywhere

Edited by Alessio Lunghi
and Seth Wheeler

<..MinOr.:.>
.cOmpOsitiOns.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Stevphen Shukaitis, Emma Dowling, David
Harvie, Ben Lear, Alex Andrews, Alice Nutter, Fergus Jenkins, Brian Layng,
Katy Smith and Paul Mason for their unending help and patience in
achieving this project.

This book is dedicated to Luca, Poppy, Katy and Frances.

Occupy Everything: Reflections on Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere
Edited by Alessio Lunghi and Seth Wheeler

ISBN 978-1-57027-251-6

Cover design by Alessio Lunghi
Cover photo © Yiannis Biliris www.greekriots.com
Interior design by briandesign

Released by Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from
autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia
www.minorcompositions.info | minorcompositions@gmail.com

Distributed by Autonomedia
PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station
Brooklyn, NY 1211

www.autonomedia.org
info@autonomedia.org

You may ask yourself, well, how didI get here?

— Talking Heads

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and

his relations with his kind.

— Karl Marx

Contents

Introduction
Seth Wheeler & Alessio Lunghi

On the graduate with no future
Thomas Gillespie & Victoria Habermehl

Ideology fail
500 Hammers

On fairy dust andrupture
The Free Association

All the memes of production
Deterritorial Support Group

If you don't let us dream, we won't let you sleep?
Ben Lear & Raph Schlembach

The revenge of the remainder
Camille Barbagallo & Nicholas Beuret

Fear and loathing
David Robertshaw, Rohan Orton & Will Barker

A funny thing happened on the way to the square
Antonis Vradis

The revolution is my boyfriend
Tabitha Bast & Hannah Mcclure

Do the entrepreneuriat dream of electric sheep?
Andre Pusey & Bertie Russell

Radicalising the armed forces
Federico Campagna

Some complications ...and their political economy
Emma Dowling

APPENDIX Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere
Paul Mason

Introduction

Seth Wheeler & Alessio Lunghi

enned in February 2011, Paul Mason’s blog post “20 Reasons Why It’s
Kicking Off Everywhere” responded to the recent wave of student
unrest, the European anti-cuts struggles, and what was fast becom-
ing known as the Arab Spring. In his short post Mason offered 20 tenta-
tive forays into these globally disparate yet somehow connected struggles.

“20 Reasons” was warmly received within the social movements it
commented upon, albeit not without criticisms. What resonated for us,
was its lack of certainty as to where these movements were headed, and
a pronounced distance from either ideological interpretation or “off the
shelf” solutions.

It seemed that many in the social movements were content to carry on
with business as usual, attaching longheld ideological certainties onto these
developments. However some in existing activist groups, networks and
organisations, began to question whether ideas, assumptions and certainties
held from previous cycles of struggle could stand up to present challenges.

We saw “20 Reasons’ as a chance to start an enquiry, a framework
around which to better discuss our understandings of the present and as
a means to gauge the effectiveness of movement responses to the crisis’s
facing capitalism and the nation state.

“20 Reasons’ itself highlighted a series of political, economic, social,
communicative and technological developments and suggested how
these were being appropriated in struggle. The emergence of new or often
ignored social subjects were also central to the piece - be that the “gradu-
ate with no future’ or the socially excluded.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

Understanding the present became an issue of importance and
urgency for those interested in radical social transformation. As such,
we commissioned a series of essays, responding to Paul’s “20 Reasons’, as
a means to do just that.

In their opening essay, Thomas Gillespie and Victoria Habermehl,
active in the Leeds University Occupation and part of the Really Open
University (an ongoing project concerned with the transformation of the
University from a neo-liberal model to a space held in common), explore
the motivations and revolutionary potential of “The Graduate with No
Future’.

In “The Revenge of the Remainder”, Nic Beuret and Camille Barbagallo
expand on this in their discussion of the precariousness of life in contem-
porary capitalism. Written before the riots in England in August 201, the
authors outline a shift in the role of the unemployed/underemployed in
capitalist development. Reserved - historically - as an army of surplus
labour, they suggest that the “remainder” are increasingly excluded from
even this role, with little or no opportunity for work and relegated now to
the role of consumer or as the mere object of state-initiated control methods.

In their contribution, “On Fairy Dust and Rupture”, The Free
Association, an ongoing anti-capitalist writing project, ask how an insur-
rection might resonate beyond its point of origin. They attempt to develop
a materialist understanding of the role of chance in social movements,
which might help us “to conjure up something beyond ourselves, some-
thing we can't wholly know, something beyond the existing ‘natural’ limits
of society; something ‘supernatural’.”

Much has been made of the so called Twitter/Facebook revolution
by the professional media, in their accounts of 2011's unfolding struggles.
And it is certain that social media played an active role in the dissemina-
tion of dissent. The Deterritorial Support Group (who describe themselves
as “ultra-leftist” and as a “think-tank’) explore the revolutionary poten-
tial of those who have grown up immersed in online culture. Their essay

“All the Memes of Production” considers the role of the meme and online
cultures of solidarity and their real world applications.

In “If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep?”, Ben Lear
and Raph Schlembach (editors of the journal Shift) explore the failure of
capitalism to deliver upon its promises of unending growth. Critical of the
defensive positions undertaken by many in the anti-austerity movements,

INTRODUCTION

they argue for a robust engagement within present struggles, informed
by the demand for “luxury for all” and not for a return to the world as it
was before the crisis.

David Robertshaw, Rohan Orton and Will Barker (from the writing
collective 500 Hammers) consider the failure of ideologies to attach them-
selves to real world events. In “Ideology Fail”, they argue that the digital
age has heralded a significant change in how ideas are both disseminated
and received.

In a second contribution entitled “Fear and Loathing”, the same
authors also consider whether young radicals really have lost their fear
and really can pick and choose their battles as Paul Mason suggests.

Antonis Vradis (a contributor to the blog Occupied London) reports
from Greece, suggesting that all facets of social resistance, from the mobi-
lisations against police brutality to struggles in the workplace have merged
into each other in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Square’.

In “The Revolution is my Boyfriend’, Tabitha Bast and Hannah
Mcclure (Leeds Space project, New Weapons Reading Group) consider
leadership in the new movements, paying particular attention to the
role of gender.

Andre Pusey and Bertie Russell (Really Open University) reflect on
contemporary conceptualisations of power in their analysis of present
forms of class composition, management and capitalist accumulation in
their essay, “Do the Entrepreneuriat Dream of Electric Sheep?”

Federico Campagna (a member of the journal through europe) consid-
ers what tactics and conceptual tools are open to popular movements in
their attempts to avoid military/state repression in his essay “Radicalising
the Armed Services’.

The final contribution addresses the caveats Paul Mason makes to
his “20 Reasons’. In “Some Complications... and their Political Economy”,
Emma Dowling looks at the present crisis of social reproduction and
assesses the ramifications of the state and capital’s recuperation of move-
ments for autonomy and self-organisation. In the context of the UK, she
confronts the Big Society beyond its rhetoric and analyses the wider inter-
play between austerity and market expansion as a front-line for contem-
porary struggles and collective organisation.

Inevitably, this short collection of essays provokes more questions
than it can possibly answer. But questions are often more desirable than

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

firm solutions, especially in the realm of politics. History is littered with
the tragedies of those who put blind faith and certainty ahead of challeng-
ing their own assumptions. Inquiry opens up alternative pathways, elicits
tactics and provokes future strategies not previously considered: “asking
questions as we walk’, as the Zapatistas say.

If we are certain of anything, it is that the very history that was
declared to have reached an end is alive again. Once many believed “it
was more possible to imagine the end of the world than the end of capi-
talism” - we wish to report that the future now seems more uncertain.
Again, the possibility to imagine and construct a life outside of capital-
ism seems both realistic and vital.

On the graduate with no future

Thomas Gillespie & Victoria Habermehl

n November 10", 2010 approximately 50,000 students marched
O in London against the British government's plan to slash funding

for education. The march took the authorities by surprise when
it deviated from its planned route and led to an occupation of the ruling
Conservative party’s headquarters. This event was followed by months
of sustained militant action throughout the UK, with marches, strikes,
occupations and happenings breaking out across campuses and cities on
an almost daily basis. Participants did not belong toa single party, organi-
sation or campaign. Rather, they comprised a diverse field of actors, many
of whom had no history of militancy, who all appeared to have reached
some sort of psychological breaking point. In what follows, we seek to
understand why years of generalised apathy in the face of the strategic
commodification of higher education in the UK suddenly gave way to this
wave of mass resistance at the end of last year. We believe that this rebel-
lion is driven by the growing perception that where once the university
graduate had a bright future, now they have none.

This crisis of confidence in the university has been a long time
in the making, beginning with the bubble of optimism created by the
restructuring of higher education at the end of the Second World War.
In the 1940s, 50s and ’60s, successive British governments pumped
huge amounts of public money into the universities in order to drasti-
cally increase the number of student places and to remove the finan-
cial barriers to studying through the introduction of universal grants
to cover tuition and living costs. As a result, working class youths

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

growing up in the second half of the 20" century had the opportu-
nity to become socially mobile and access the higher echelons of the
job market through obtaining a degree. Ploughing public money into
higher education was justified on the grounds that the nation as a whole
(and not just the individual graduates themselves) would benefit from
the training of university graduates. Clement Attlee, Britain’s post-
war Labour Prime Minister, captured the mood of the time when he
announced that:

we cannot hope to solve our post-war problems unless we can
increase the supply of trained men and women in the various
departments of our national life.*

Opening up the universities to a wider cross section of the population was
justified on the grounds that it was in the public interest to train scientists,
engineers, doctors, dentists and teachers, not to mention arts graduates
for executive and management posts in the private sector.

Today, this understanding of higher education as a public good is
being eroded by the neoliberal tendency to extend market principles to
all spheres of social life. Increasingly, a degree is understood through the
lens of consumerism as a commodity to be purchased by an individual.
Since the 1990s the public has incrementally reduced the proportion of
the cost of degrees that it funds collectively via the state and the student
has had to fund more and more of this cost as an individual through
the payment of fees. When fees were introduced in 1998, students were
expected to pay £1,000 per year. This rose to £3,000 in 2004. If the current
government is successful in implementing their proposed public spending
cuts then students will be paying up to £9,000 a year. In addition, main-
tenance grants have been replaced with repayable student loans for all
but the very poorest students. When they first introduced fees and loans,
Tony Blair’s Labour government was following the recommendations of
the 1997 Dearing Report, which argued that:

those with higher education qualifications are the main benefici-
aries (of higher education), through improved employment pros-
pects and pay. Asa consequence, we suggest that graduates in work
should make a greater contribution to the costs of higher educa-
tion in future.”

ON THE GRADUATE WITH NO FUTURE

This report, and the resulting policy, clearly represented a rejection of
the underlying logic of the post-war public university and signaled the
emergence of a market rationality as the dominant organising principle
in higher education.

This shift from public to private finance has triggered a correspond-
ing and significant shift in the subjectivity of the contemporary student,
i.e. the way that they understand themselves, the world around them
and their relationships in that world. Since higher education is increas-
ingly something that the individual must purchase at considerable cost,
probably saddling themselves with tens of thousands of pounds of debt
in the process, the decision to undertake a degree inevitably comes to be
understood through an economic lens of cost-benefit analysis. According
to the neoliberal rationality of higher education, a degree is only worth
having if it will enable you to earn significantly more in the future than
you would without such a qualification. This difference in earning power is
often referred to as the “graduate premium’, but it might as well be called
the “profit margin”. The consequence of this change in subjectivity is, as
Jason Read has argued, that when they take a degree, students are acting
like entrepreneurs who are making a capital investment with a view to
generating a healthy return in the future. The university is interpreted,
especially by those who attend it, as an investment in their human capital.
Every class, every extracurricular activity, every activity or club becomes
a possible line ona resume, becomes an investment in human capital. The
question asked by every student at practically every college or university
is: “how will this help me get a job?”’

The political implication of this shift in subjectivity is that the field
of higher education becomes characterised by isolated, competitive, self-
interested individuals who think of themselves as mini-entrepreneurs
competing in a marketplace. Whereas the public university was funded
on the grounds that it was a collective investment that would benefit
society as a whole, the neoliberal university attracts funds on an individ-
ual basis from students who want to invest in themselves and their own
market potential.

One of the flaws in creating an education system that encourages
students to think like mini-capitalists is that capital requires a profitable
return on its investment or else people will lose confidence in the system
and it will go into crisis. This is exactly what is happening in the current

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

environment of recession and austerity, as a whole generation of young
people who personally invested in their education on the assumption that
they would be rewarded with added earning power are graduating only
to be greeted with indifference from potential employers. In early 2011,
the UK Office for National Statistics reported the highest unemployment
rate for those aged between 16 and 24 since “comparable records began’, at
20.6%. Of those young graduates who do have a job, many have to settle
for poorly paid and precarious positions in call centres, shops and bars
rather than the professional graduate opportunities that were so abundant
for our parents generation. In those sectors that hold greater attraction to
graduates - suchas the media, or the so-called “voluntary sector” - there
simply aren't enough jobs to go around.

How does the contemporary British graduate respond when they
find themselves in this unenviable situation, accumulating interest on
their student debt whilst pulling pints in order to (only just) pay the rent?
Until recently, there has been nothing in the way of a collective political
response to this disappointment. Rather, and consistent with the neo-
liberal subjectivity of the contemporary student, we have witnessed the
emergence amongst graduates of individualistic self-help strategies to try
and get ahead of the competition in the constricting jobs market.

One such strategy is the unpaid internship. From the perspective of an
economic subject who understands education as a personal “investment”in
one’s human capital, selling one’s labour for free for several months makes
a certain kind of sense. While the worker receives nothing in the way of
wages for their labour, they are encouraged to think that they are, once
again, investing in their own human capital by accruing work experi-
ence, references and contacts. It is on the basis of this capital that they
will hope to distinguish themselves from their peers and, at some point
in the future, get a return on their investment - a paid job in their chosen
field. This strategy has worked for some graduates, notably the privileged
minority who can afford to live and work in London for months at a time
without earning any money. For the vast majority of graduates and their
families, however, participating in such a scheme is simply beyond their
means. As such, the normalisation of the unpaid internship since the
1990s has functioned as an informal social mobility filter, preserving the
most sought after jobs for the wealthiest graduates whilst certain sectors
of the economy clean up on free labour.

ON THE GRADUATE WITH NO FUTURE

In the latter half of 2010, however, something appeared to be stir-
ring. Why was the student body politic finally awaking from decades of
slumber?

It could be argued that the wave of protest described above was
somehow contiguous with the neoliberal rationality of higher educa-
tion. Rather than challenging the commodification of higher education
per se, perhaps the young are people merely demanding better value
degrees (lower fees) and a better return on their investment (growth,
jobs). Undoubtedly this is probably the case for some of the protesters.
However, and while we do not claim to speak for everyone, we argue that
there is an emerging network of groups who are actively trying to create
a “new university that breaks with both the post-war-public and neo-
liberal-private paradigms of higher education. While these groups were
involved in the protests that swept the UK over the last months of 2010
and into 2011, they are also looking to move beyond the logic of protest to
an affirmative politics of transformation within and against the univer-
sity. Paul Mason understands these waves of protests as being based on a
new sociological type, “the graduate with no future”. As part of the group
Really Open University (ROU), formed in Leeds in early 2010, we aim to
challenge the current university system which reproduces this dynamic.

We understand the ROU as an ongoing process of re-imagining and
transformation driven by a desire to challenge the higher education
system and its role in society. Those involved explicitly reject the neo-
liberal model of higher education, where universities are run as busi-
nesses with students as consumers and where knowledge is a commod-
ity that can be bought and sold. However, we also reject the notion that
the era of the public university was a golden age that we should strive to
return to. As discussed above, the public university served the interests of
capital, rather than the common good, by reproducing the middle class
sector of the workforce. Rather than a return to this model of higher edu-
cation, we wish to see the creation of a free and empowering education
system where creative and critical thought is fostered and knowledge is
held in common. The ROU’s praxis is summed up in the slogan “strike-
occupy-transform”. We engage in creative-resistive tactics that rethink
and reclaim space, from flashmobs to public assemblies to autonomous

educational activities. Through this process the ROU hopes to engage in
affirmative struggle and, crucially, transform subjectivities by changing

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

people’s expectations of what higher education could be and what a uni-
versity can do.

Motivated by similar concerns, the Lincoln-based University of
Utopia argue that “we must dissolve the contemporary entrepreneurial
university and reconstitute the university in another more progressive
form”. A pillar of their critical project is the reconceptualisation of the
student “as producer’. The neoliberal student who “invests” thousands of
pounds in a degree thinks of themself as a consumer. The University of
Utopia, however, seek to “reconstitute the relationship between student
and academics - not as student as consumer, but as student as producer:
students working in collaboration with academics as part of the academic
project of the university”. This understanding of student as producer
informs the Social Science Centre, an independent, self-funded space in
Lincoln where higher education courses are run on a cooperative basis,
with students collaborating with teachers on course design, teaching and
research. In the same spirit, the University of Utopia has also been suc-
cessful in pushing for the introduction of more research-related activities
to the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Lincoln, where its
members are based. Student as producer signifies a break with neoliberal
subjectivity through a shift in emphasis away from exchange to produc-
tion - participating in education is about producing the common, not
about purchasing a commodity.*

Members of both the University of Utopia and the Really Open
University attended a gathering organised by the international Edu-factory
network in Paris in February 2011. Groups and individuals from Europe,
Tunisia, Japan, the US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Argentina met
to discuss and organise a network based on our common struggles around
education. One of the key themes of discussion was the prevalence of pre-
cariousness, and the common statement issued at the end of the gath-
ering called for the establishment of “a free university, run by students,
precarious workers and migrants, a university without borders”. This
demonstrates that we are entering a new phase of struggle. Precarity is no
longer something which workers must deal with on an individual level,
as competitive elements in a job market. Rather, it is emerging as a basis
for political organisation and class struggle on a global scale.

The emergence of this imperative to reject the old forms and rethink
the university anew, taken together with the generalised militancy of the

ON THE GRADUATE WITH NO FUTURE

recent education protests, suggests that if the university graduate is begin-
ning to reclaim their own future. This future does not lie in the intensi-
fication of competition, but in a collective rejection of debt and precarity,
and in discovering new reasons to learn that cannot be subjected to an
economic calculus of cost versus benefit.

NOTES

1 Quoted in Benn, R. and Fieldhouse R., “Government policies on university expan-
sion and wider access, 1945-51 and 1985-91 compared’, Studies in Higher Education
18, no. 3 (2003): 299-313.

2 NCIHE, Higher Education in the Learning Society (The Dearing Report), Summary
Report (London: NCIHE, 1997).

3 Read, J., “University Experience: Neoliberalism Against the Commons’ in Towards
a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge and
Exodus from the Education Factory. (New York: Autonomedia, 2005).

4 _ http://www. universityofutopia.org/

Ideology fail

“This is the language that has been wholly rejected across the

world in every advanced society. This is yesterday's claptrap.’”

hen debating with Ken Loach over the Con-Dem governments
proposed cuts to welfare and public sector services, Michael
Heseltine made reference to the crowning achievement of
neoliberalism. Not mass-privatisation of the few assets that the state
had managed to seize before the 1980s but the successful sale of the idea
that there was no more grand debate to be had, that, in the words of Peter
Mandelson, “Weare all Thatcherites now”.” Anything less than supportive
of the capitalist consensus shared by the political classes no longer needs
to be attacked - it is simply ignored. If they condescend to engage with it
then it is dismissed as fuzzy thinking, the folly of youth. The stereotypes
of students, ivory tower academics and old left dinosaurs are unflatter-
ingly contrasted with the business minded political pragmatists of the
“real” world.

A steady decline in electoral participation could be regarded as one
of the symptoms of this victory. The last general election saw a turnout
of 65.1% among registered voters - less than half of the UK’s total popu-
lation.’ If you're a true believer in the value of parliamentary democracy
then that level of disengagement ought to be seriously worrying. Amongst
non-voters there are those that regard the ballot box as a hollow gesture
and the electoral system as a sham of democracy; whereas others would say
that they believe in it as a system but that they are dispassionate about the

IDEOLOGY FAIL

outcome, trusting any of the candidates to suit their interests. Regardless
of the underlying motivations of individual non-voters, electoral absten-
tion echoes the widely perceived inadequacies of this way of collective
decision-making. An alarming number of people are either unsupport-
ive of the neoliberal consensus or sufficiently content with it that they
don't feel the need to participate by deliberating over its managerial style.

We now have generations of people who find it hard to take elections
seriously. Distrust and suspicion of politicians is the norm, and finding
someone who unequivocally supports a particular political party is akin
to encountering an evangelical Christian; both are strange and discom-
forting in their blind faith. Voting is no longer done to support something
you believe in, it’s a preventative measure that guards against the worst
excesses of parties and policies that you oppose. That classic criticism of
the disparate strands of anticapitalist politics, “you're only against some-
thing, you don't know what you're for”, now makes for a fairly accurate
portrayal of voting in parliamentary elections.

People interested in radically changing society could be forgiven for
feeling despair in this situation but there are also reasonable grounds
for optimism. Whilst the cheerleaders of neoliberalism refuse to admit
that theirs is just another ideological position that could be superseded
they also make it difficult for themselves to argue against their critics.
It's something of a challenge to be a successful advocate for an ideology
if you refuse to admit that it is an ideology in the first place. This means
that anticapitalist positions can be reframed as reasoned and pragmatic
responses to a problem. The terminology of left wing opposition groups -
anarchists, socialists, Marxists etc - may well have been tainted with the
insinuation that they are regressive or anachronistic but the ideas behind
them are as strong as ever. As these ideas shed their baggage they sneak
into the mainstream, occupying the gaps left by the crumbling mandate
of the major parties. Full-throated support for Labour died after Iraq and
the Liberal Democrats were wiped out in the local elections only a year
into coalition. There is no party that can successfully muster any eager-
ness for themselves even as an alternative to the others. This means that
any dissatisfaction with the status quo is inevitably pushed towards a poli-
tics that occupies a space far distant from the centre.

Despite lessons from history that warn of extreme nationalists’ ability
to capitalise on times of economic hardship it still feels rather difficult to

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

take them seriously as a threat. They have made numerous attempts to
realign their politics in recent years yet their focus is hopelessly out of
step with the concerns people are expressing. Try as they might to make
dubious connections, Islamic fundamentalism cannot be blamed for the
banking crisis any more than eastern European immigration can be held
responsible for public sector cuts. So the far right are now stuck in a tab-
loid-esque rut of making tenuous links between immigration, housing
shortages, job opportunities and pedophilia.

Ill tell you what right, we have no problem with mosques being
built over here so long as we can build mosques in Mecca, I'd love
to see that, I would love to see a mosque being built in Mecca.*

It is true that the English Defence League have got tens of thousands of
followers on Facebook and that they have been capable of mobilizing a
couple of thousand football casual/racist types for some of their events.
But at their most worrying they are a minor threat to public order and
their stance seems unlikely to evolve into anything remotely resembling
policy. Their highly spun mission statement stands completely at odds
with what the inarticulate punters that turn up to their events have to
say about things, so they remain a highly confused angry mob. It seems
at times that the counter demonstrations that are organised actually end
up legitimising them beyond their real reach and provides the EDL with
the conflict that they thrive upon. It would almost be more fitting to use
interviews with EDL members to emphasise the importance of adequately
funding public education than as a reason to worry about a rising nation-
alist tendency among the wider public.

Alongside the street presence of the EDL the more policy oriented BNP
are running into trouble. The “debate” in the run up to the AV referendum
saw both the “yes” and “no” camps making use of them as a bogeymen to
scare people with and it would be foolish to ignore the fact that they have
made some gains in the recent past. That said, these gains have failed to
translate into seats other than at a European level and they have been offset
by travesty after travesty. They've been publicly ridiculed on Question
Time, uninvited to the Queen's garden party, had their members list leaked
to the public and the courts have found their membership criteria to be
incompatible with racial equality laws. In the aftermath of the 2010 elec-
tion an ill-calculated leadership challenge saw expulsions and infighting

IDEOLOGY FAIL

that left a significant number of unfilled vacancies in their organisation.
This was then topped off by an out of court settlement to Unilever that
brought them to the verge of bankruptcy after their unauthorised use of
the Marmite brand during a party political broadcast. Partly as a result of
all this, the recent local elections saw them lose 11 of their 13 council seats.*

“I’M NOT YOUR COMRADE”

At the same time on the left there is a sense of things changing. An increas-
ing militant tendency is developing with widespread talk of strike action
in various sectors, occupations from the Gaddafi mansion in Hampstead
to over 20 university campuses, not to mention the largest Black Bloc in
UK history. Younger people are coming to the fore, largely indifferent to
the sectarian squabbles of previous generations. Although the infighting
persists in some quarters, other groups have made moves that hint at the
possibility of a sea change. Early in 2011 the Climate Camp network dis-
banded after 5 years of direct action against causes of man-made global
warming with a recognition that as times have changed so too must they.”
In doing so they also abandoned the somewhat restrictive nature of single-
issue interventions. Equally promising was the refusal of the “good pro-
tester/bad protester” dichotomy by the UK Uncut spokesperson on BBC
Newsnight in the aftermath of March 26"".* These may be small steps in
the right direction but they are refreshingly so.

In the background to all of this it seems significant that our collec-
tive relationships with information and analysis are changing. In the past,
when the large national news companies were the major outlets of infor-
mation for what was going on in the world, it was difficult to find alterna-
tive commentaries on current events. The mainstream media has always
implicitly supported the status quo: there may be scores of articles criti-
cal of a government or its policy, but the suggestion that representative
democracy is a bad system is virtually non-existent. Specific companies
can act in a corrupt or negligent manner, but capitalism itself is never put
on trial. For a critical analysis of this kind it was necessary to go to the
texts of fringe political parties and organisations.

Today the critical analysis often comes to you. The habit of linking
articles on social media sites has created a situation where select pieces
of information, from a wide range of sources are presented in a feed that
is not only as wide-ranging as your own interests but as broad as those

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

of your friends and contacts as well. Alongside a Guardian article or BBC
page, there appears a link to an anarchist blogger, an article in the Socialist
Worker, or maybe one from Al Jazeera. In addition to this, first hand
accounts of the situation on the ground at major events are now routinely
posted up on Youtube or Twitter and circulated within 24 hours. Amongst
such a multitude of sources it seems to be difficult to commit to any one
group or ideology. There are no longer any “classic texts’, instead there is
tendency of cherry picking ideas and information, of engaging critically
with the material that is presented.

This barrage of information through an ever-changing series of con-
nections stands at odds with outmoded ideas of a party line. The fluidity of
the online world translates into impatience with the static nature of many
groups in the physical world. As ideas flows more easily people learn to
make connections and form and re-form groups almost seamlessly. The
way information moves through the internet makes it difficult to hold
on to a hermetic set of beliefs, it constructs people who would have dif-
ficulty even conceiving of such a thing. Of course there is the other face
of that wealth of connectivity, the ability to surround oneself with those
who strictly adhere to one’s own ideology; yet this seems to be the excep-
tion rather than the norm.

This should not be taken as an argument that the internet will
somehow solve all of our problems or that it is an inherently positive
force. Whilst the reluctance to accept dogmatic ideology or tie oneself
to a traditional party or group is refreshing, it sometimes comes at the
expense of coherent group action. Knowledge may be power but power is
useless unless it is exercised, and a struggle must move beyond informa-
tion exchange and debate to activity in a physical realm. The collapse of
rigid ideologies in the face of new forms of communication and think-
ing potentially presents us with new ways of forming mass organisations
that that could retain a serious radical agenda among their members and
take action in ways that previous broad church associations failed to do;
Hopefully this can be achieved without them relegating themselves to the
exclusive clubs of radicals, screaming from the sidelines.

NOTES
1 Newsnight: Michael Heseltine and Ken Loach, October 6, 2010, available at http://
www. youtube.com/watch?v=J6OLguh7_P8

IDEOLOGY FAIL

Mathew Tempest, “Mandelson: We're all Thatcherites now”, the Guardian, Juneio™,
2002.

http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/

“EDL Mastermind”, http://www. youtube. com/watch? v=4voGoMQvO0Q.

“Vote 2011: BNP suffers council seat losses”, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
ule politics-13313069

Heard at the Michael Sadler Lecture Theatre Occupation at Leeds University, http://
leedsucu. wordpress.com/2010/11/28/leeds-occupiers-host-a-model-symposium/
“Metamorphosis: A statement from the Camp for Climate Action’, http://www.cli-
matecamp.org.uk/2011-statement.

Interview with UK Uncut, Newsnight, March 28", 201, http://www. youtube.com/
watch? v=5IhS7yBcMnE

On fairy dust andrupture

The Free Association

It began with the suicide, a self-immolation by fire, of aman
who has been downgraded to unemployment, and to whom
was forbidden the miserable commerce that allowed him to
survive; and because a female police officer slapped him in the
face for not understanding what in this world is real. Ina few
days this gesture becomes wider and in a few weeks millions
of people scream their joy on a distant square and this entails
the beginning of the catastrophe for the powerful potentates.

- Alain Badiou, 2011

Before, I watched television; now television is watching me.
~ Egyptian rebel, 2011°

n the 1980s security experts in the West used the idea of the domino

effect to talk about social movements in Central America. El Salvador,

Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras: the US government feared that
victory by “communist” (sic) forces would threaten its own strategic inter-
ests. If one government were allowed to fall to popular power, neighbour-
ing regimes would topple, one after the other, until the spectre of revolu-
tion was at the gates of the US itself. Underlying the domino theory was
the laughable notion that outside agitators (in this case, Moscow or Cuban
trained revolutionaries) were somehow responsible for the rise of popular
national liberation movements. But the domino theory was also part of a
wider outlook that tries to squeeze social movements into a mechanistic

ON FAIRY DUST AND RUPTURE

and linear framework: this event sparks that movement, that movement
leads to this rebellion.

Thirty years ago UK politics was transformed by a series of riots that
raged across every major town and city. In the space of 10 days in July
1981, eruptions in London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds were mir-
rored by street battles in less glamorous locations like Cirencester, Market
Harborough and Dunstable. The ferocity of the riots was stunning. But
even more shocking, for the state, was the speed with which they spread.
Newspapers talked of outside agitators traveling the country on motor-
bikes, but more tellingly they warned of the “copycat effect”. Fast forward
30 years, and the Arab Spring saw oppositional movements emerging and
spreading with an awesome speed. Their effects were not confined to North
Africa. Think, for example, of the slogans on the March 26'” demonstra-
tion in London: “walk like an Egyptian’, “strike like an Egyptian’, “riot
like an Egyptian”. A timeline on YouTube gives some sense of the global
spread of protest and uprising over the three months between December
2010 and March 2011.’ Social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook
clearly played a role in expanding those movements and the speed of
that exchange was significant. But in itself that’s not enough to explain
the power of these events. Struggles have always circulated one way or
another. In the 1790s the Black Jacobins in Haiti and revolutionaries in
Paris couldn't rely on tweets but news went back and forth on the ships that
crossed the Atlantic. So the question is this: why are some events taken
up, re-interpreted and re-played elsewhere? What connects a suicide and
millions of people screaming their joy?

Capital and the state tend to treat popular movements as a virus that
must be purged from the system. It’s a narrative that we too have often
adopted. Rebellion is contagious and there's an infectious joy to be found
in a collective “no’, a refusal to accept the world-as-it-is. Developing this
medical analogy further, we can talk about viral models, the way a prac-
tice developed in one context can be reproduced worldwide. Protest can
be seen as a meme that self-replicates across a range of environments. For
example, in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and elsewhere, the occupation of
public space (Tahrir Square, Pearl Roundabout) became a central theme
in shaping opposition to those regimes. We can trace a connection here to
other simple acts of disobedience or resistance that rapidly take off, like
Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus, or the mass refusal of

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

the Poll Tax. These acts are usually low-cost entry points into a move-
ment: people can “do’ them, and so become part of a “movement”, without
risking very much (to join the anti-Poll Tax movement, all you had to do
was not pay something that many of us couldn't afford to pay anyway).

But talking about memes or viruses doesn't get us far enough. As
people active in social movements, we are not neutral transmitters of
information and practices. Those practices first have to make sense to us.
We see or hear something that speaks to our lives. We then interpret it,
apply it and pass it on. It’s more useful to think of movements spreading
by resonance rather than contamination.

Aninsurrection is not like a plague ora forest fire - a linear process
which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather
takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed
in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own
vibrations, always taking on more density.*

How does an insurrection resonate? How does a social uprising take on
more density? In Tunisia, when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in
Sidi Bouzid, riots immediately followed. A few days later, Hussein Nagi
Felhi climbed an electricity pole, shouted “no for misery, no for unem-
ployment”, and then electrocuted himself. That cry of “no for misery, no
for unemployment” spoke to the lives of working-class Tunisians and
made sense to them in a way that it could never make sense to the Ben Ali
regime. In exactly the same way, the rupture created by the July 1981 riots
was seized upon by an angry, alienated and youthful working class who
felt its meaning. In Luton, for example, a mob began by attacking a pub
frequented by racists, and then moved on to attack the police and the local
Tory party HQ. Asa rioter in Brixton later explained: “It was the thing to
do.” Again, speaking about the response of Italian workers to news of the
Russian Revolution of February 1917, Wu Ming say this: “Those proletar-
ians asked themselves: ‘What does this remote event look like? What does
it feel like?’ And they answered: ‘It feels like what I'd like to do myself!”*
Of course, it’s easy to read history backwards in this way, as if action
X inevitably produced result Y. As if things could only have turned out
this way. But at any one point there are infinite possible futures and events
don't always resonate so clearly or quickly. We remember Rosa Parks,
but not Claudette Colvin. History is littered with discarded leaflets, dead

ON FAIRY DUST AND RUPTURE

campaigns, acts that didn't take off. Or in Samuel Beckett’s words: “Ever
tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

If insurrection takes the shape of music, then perhaps music can
tell us something about how to fail better. There's a famous bootleg tape
of 1960s band The Troggs having a hilariously sweary argument at a
recording session.° The sound engineer, who failed to press stop on the
tape player, captured a band trying desperately to grasp what turns any
particular song into a hit record. The conclusion they reached is now leg-
endary: “You got to put a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard.”
When we seek to go beyond what seems possible, analysis can only take
us so far. We can use the idea of fairy dust as a stand-in for the element of
chance in political action. Perhaps The Troggs were channeling a wider
point about the process of creation. After all, if we shift the register from
pop music to revolutionary political analysis, the problem of the elusive
hit record could read something like: how do isolated acts of resistance gel
to become mass rebellions? And what conditions make them more likely to
succeed, even if only for a short time?

Fairy dust is more than just a nice metaphor. Perhaps we can use
it, in a materialist way, to talk about things that normally evade analy-
sis. The power of events like the 1981 riots or the 2011 Arab Spring is that
they puncture normality. Our notion of what is possible is constrained
by the “reality” of everyday life. Sometimes it takes an act of imagination
(of fiction, even) to reveal the real potential. By breaking our understand-
ing of what is natural, such events introduce the “supernatural”. The
economic crisis, which began in 2007, has severely dented belief in the

“naturalness” of the neoliberal worldview. The series of revolts that have
followed, from Athens to London, from Tunis to Cairo, have allowed us
to glimpse a different, re-potentialised world. Is this, perhaps, a glimpse
of the “supernatural”?

Of course neoliberalism isn't dead; its current zombie state seems
stubbornly persistent. Meanwhile our political and media elites con-
tinue to broadcast from within the old worldview, as if such events never
happened. “Politicians within the parliamentary-democratic system (or
its near equivalents) are entirely caught up in the logic of killing politics
[a logic we can] associate with capitalism. It is a logic that aims to ‘natu-
ralise’ - and hence automate and de-politicise - political decisions.” It is
this natural logic that is used to justify austerity. The political possibilities

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

opened up by the crisis have disappeared behind a veil of apparent necessity.
The mantra of neoliberalism remains the same: There Is No Alternative.

Destroying this mask of naturalness is far from easy. Politicians (and
indeed the rest of us) are not the freely choosing agents presupposed by
liberal ideology. They are caught up in this logic of killing politics and
even if they wanted to escape it they simply wouldn't know how. Marx and
Engels captured this point when they channeled Faust in the Communist
Manifesto: “Modern bourgeois society is... like the sorcerer who is no longer
able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by
his spells.” Capitalism isn’t just greed; nor is it reducible to the nefarious
plans of individual capitalists or politicians. It is a set of logics that we are
all caught up in, a series of abstract dynamics that have been summoned
forth but which, during their operation, come to appear as natural and
eternal. Isn't this what we might understand as Capitalist Sorcery?

We are all caught up in forces that we can't quite get at. As we go
about our everyday lives, as we go to work or to the shops, we presuppose,
for instance, that money will be the basis of our interactions. Because we
presuppose these things they seem beyond our control. Of course we also
know that our interactions contain something in excess of capital, some-
thing human, but we are continually encouraged to discount this excess.
Such dynamics are facets of capitalism but they are made worse by neo-
liberalism. As politicians impose competitive markets in ever more areas
of life. As we are put into situations that force us to see others as com-
petitors, as we repeat behaviours over and over, then it becomes harder
to make out where capital ends and we begin. As the Gang of Four put
it: “Each day seems like a natural fact.” The paradox is that the effects of
capital become hidden and ungraspable and yet they act concretely to
limit our lives.

Anticapitalist politics is about breaking with these limitations, it is
about re-potentialising the world. However to most people, most of the
time, anticapitalist politics don’t quite make sense. The individual compo-
nents might be sensible enough but as a whole it just doesn't seem viable.
Itis, after all, an “unnatural” position to take, with so much in our every-
day lives arguing against it. Events and crises, however, put the continu-
ation of our previous everyday lives into doubt. When the “naturalness”
of the current state of things begins to lose its grip, then the space opens
up for “supernatural” solutions.

ON FAIRY DUST AND RUPTURE

Despite the disappearance of the crisis behind the veil of necessity, we
still feel something changed in 2008. It is hard to make out what that some-
thing consists of; it has, after all remained, largely mute. Opinion polls,
however, continue to report sizeable proportions disagreeing that the free
market economy is “the best system”, even in countries such as the United
States. With some analysis though we can begin to guess at its contours.
The “natural” state of things once seemed to promise an improved life - if
not for us then at least for our children. Now that promise appears empty
and the “natural” state of things seems more like a trap. If the path to what
we currently understand as “the good life” becomes blocked, then we can
come to question whether it was such a “good life” after all. This is why it
has been so hard to make out the something that has changed; it isa change
in the underlying structure of contemporary desire. What we once desired,
and the mechanisms that produced those desires, have lost their coherence.

This means that new desires are being produced and with them new
political possibilities. We can be sure of this because of the change in recent
struggles. We have seen the unexpected resonance of previously minority
ideas. We have seen the emergence of the kind of movements not seen for
a generation. We have seen cascades of events that have broken forty-year
stalemates. Yet we still don’t know how far the new possibilities go because
they have not been given full expression. Only collective political action
can do this and our task, if we have one, is to see if we can trigger it. The
problem, of course, is that we are also caught, toa greater or lesser extent,
within the current sense of things. As such we, as anticapitalist militants,
are also sorcerers. We are trying to conjure up something beyond our-
selves, something we can't wholly know, something beyond the existing

“natural” limits of society; something “supernatural”.

Itis in conditions like these that concepts like fairy dust begin to make
sense. Fairy dust invokes the need for a gamble, a roll of the dice, an exper-
iment. For this we need to leave our safety zones. “We don't know’ thus
makes us leave the safety of the regime of judgment for one of risk, the
risk of failure that accompanies all creation.”* But involving the element
of chance doesn't mean just trusting to luck. We can think of the process
of putting “a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard” as a kind of
incantation that draws on past experience in order to exceed it. Even the
Troggs knew that the path to fairy dust lies between knowledge and cliché:

“T know that it needs strings, that I do know.”

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

Given this, we can see the occupation of Millbank Towers during the
demonstration against tuition fees as an invocation. That jubilant show
of defiance as boots went through windows crystallised a new mood of
militancy. By doing so it conjured up a movement no one was expecting.
Yet that movement has stuttered as it has failed to generalise. Another
example of actions sprinkled with fairy dust can be found with UK Uncut.
Who could have predicted that occupations of Vodafone shops would res-
onate so widely and spread so virally? Was it the result of fortuitous cir-
cumstances? Or did the specifics of its incantations facilitate its spread?

UK Uncut certainly shows us some of the elements needed for a con-
temporary invocation of politics. Firstly it manages to capture a spreading
desire to take part in direct action. There is a deeply felt need for a new col-
lective, participatory politics to counter the parliamentary-democratic sys-
tem’s killing of politics. Yet UK Uncut’s actions also spread because they are
easily replicable. They have a low entry level. Taking part isn't too difficult.
It doesn't require too much preparation or specialist knowledge. The risks
involved are not too high. Secondly, although the actions contain a “supernat-
ural” element, they also make immediate sense. The argument is instantly
grasped: austerity is a political decision and not the result of a “law of nature’.
It is a political decision not to tax corporations and the rich as rigorously as
the rest of us. Itis a political decision to impose the costs of the crisis onto the
poorest of society and those who did least to cause it. The UK Uncut actions,
and the police response they provoke, reveal some of the dynamics of capital
that neoliberalism seeks to deny. They reveal, for example, that capital con-
tains different and antagonistic interests and that politicians, the police and
contemporary structures of power align themselves with certain interests
and against others. It is a political decision to do so.

Yet there is a danger here. Because actions must be instantly under-
standable, they can only push so far into the boundaries of what it is cur-
rently possible to say. They must by necessity still contain many of our
society's hidden presuppositions to thought. If the actions don't contain
a dynamic that pushes further and generalises wider, then the movement
risks collapsing back into the sense of the old world. We are all too familiar
with this. “Of course we'd love to tax the bankers’, says the government,

“but if we did they'd simply move to Geneva.” The parliamentary-demo-
cratic system seeks to kill every revelation of a political decision with a
new ‘naturalisation’.

ON FAIRY DUST AND RUPTURE

Now we can make out the third necessary element of our incanta-
tions. Our forms of action must include mechanisms or moments that set
the conditions for collective analysis. Perhaps they must build in spaces,
physical and temporal, which can maintain collectivity while slowing
down the level of intensity. We need that familiar rhythm between the
high intensity of action and the cooler pace of discussion and analysis. It’s
only by maintaining this rhythm that we can push further through the
dynamics of capital that limit our lives. In such conditions movements
can change and adapt in order to generalise. During the student move-
ment the occupations played something of this role but on their own
they weren't enough. For a movement to move, it must exceed the condi-
tions of its own emergence. While a small group might stumble across a
workable incantation, they must conjure up forces that make themselves
redundant. The aim must be to make the mass its own analyst, to spread
the potential for leadership across the whole of the collective body. After
all if a genie gives you three wishes, then your last request should always
be for another three wishes.

NOTES

The Free Association is an ongoing experiment loosely based in Leeds, in the north of
the UK, although we find ourselves at home nowhere (and everywhere).

www. freelyassociating.org.

1 “Tunisa, Eygpt: The Universal Reach of Popular Uprisings”, at http://www. lacan.
com/thesymptom/? page_id=1031.
Cited by Badiou, “Tunisa, Eygpt: The Universal Reach of Popular Uprisings”.
http: //bit.ly/wlmxrD.
The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext, 2009).
Two brilliant accounts of the 1981 riots are Like a Summer with a Thousand Julys (http: //
libcom.org/library/summer-thousand-julys-other-seasons) and We Want to Riot, Not
to Work; Wu Ming1, “We're all February of 1917’, at http: //www.wumingfoundation.
com/english/wumingblog/? p=1810.
6 http://www. youtube.com/watch? v=En4ase-1-FA.
Phillipe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
8 Pignarre and Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery, 44.

naRWN

All the memes of production

Deterritorial Support Group

hen Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 he drew

upon his field of genetics and evolution to provide a rich meta-

phor for the way ideas, and systems of ideas, were transferred
between populations. Rather than holding their form as they might origi-
nally be conceived by their author or originator, ideas changed according
to their environments, developing to suit the needs of those using them,
adapting to external conditions, much like a gene might. Based upon
their suitability, universality or ability to shape-shift, ideas either took
root and survived or died out. It remains a reasonably simple idea - for
example, religions who held a degree of understandability, adaptability
and universality spread quickly across the world, much as a virus might.
Others, lacking relevance for those who came into contact with them,
burdened by rituals which failed to touch their participants, died out, or
existed only in small, homogenous populations.

Dawkins’ lucid idea caught the eye of those with a particular inter-
est in the field. Fittingly, however, it wasn't until we experienced a major
change in the concrete conditions of the information environment that
the idea of memetics really took hold. Prior to the invention and popu-
larisation of the internet the meme was an interesting theory - today it’s
a conceptual tool without which our understanding of information trans-
fer would be unable to function. More than this, the meme has becomea
self-conscious and self-reflexive idea; memes are called out at their birth,
referred to as memes in their early life, become riffed upon until they reach
a position of universality, or die, unsuitable for further use.

ALL THE MEMES OF PRODUCTION

It is in the pervert’s hothouse, online megafora 4chan.org, alterna-
tively defined by FOX News as the “internet hate machine’, that the most
ubiqitous memes of internet history have emerged. 4chan.org, created
by Chris Poole at age 15, functions principally as a imageboard' based on
the Japanese model popularised by the Futaba Channel. 4Chan is home
to 10 million regular users, with anonymity being the socially acceptable
default. The most visited board on the site is the random - or /b/ board -
the inhabitants of which are affectionately referred to as /b/tards.”

What sets 4chan apart from any other online community is not just
its preference for anonymity or its anti-leader and anti-celebrity ethic but
the sheer speed at which ideas, images and threads are generated, com-
monly referred to as the hivemind.’

A primary driver of memes within 4chan and within wider social
networking is the concept of “lulz”. A bastardisation of the plural of the
popular acronym “lol”, lulz are essentially the raison d’étre of the inter-
net meme - an attempt to derive humour, usually through a joke of
prank. But more than this - humour for its own sake, humour devoid
of a moral framework. For the internet to crash into someone’s lives,
rip up their family photos and take a shit in their front room, and to
find it funny. Lulz are more than a social glue for the fabric of internet
society - they are an ideology, a be-all-and-end-all. For 4chan and the
culture it has spurned, lulz are the embodiment of a certain corporate
ethos - “EVERYTHING IN THE LULZ, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE LULZ,
NOTHING AGAINST THE LULZ”. To feel a twinge of sympathy for the
victim of a raid’ is not to engage in a moral discourse - it’s to betray
weakness, and unacceptable dissent against the ideology. It is to render
oneself a “MoralFag”.°

Joke memes (memetic lulz) operate by a continual development of the
humorous content, adding more and more layers to the joke until some-
times the original source of humour has been totally removed. Instead,
it’s the referencing back to its own history that becomes the source of
humour. However, with the need for the humour to actually make sense in
relation to the content removed, the form itself becomes its own subject.
Content unrelated can be added to this, picking up some of the cache of
the original meme to ensure its reproduction.”

It is within this context of a completely amoral historical role that
we must analyse the significant and under-critiqued change in internet

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

culture in the past few years, then. From the “end-point” of total irony
has developed a deviant culture - Anonymous, an online group engag-
ing in online and IRL’ political and social actions. Anonymous is a sig-
nificant case study in internet memetics; and, importantly, in the move
froma focus of lulz and life-ruination to an engaged and effective attempt
at political organisation for the aim of radical social change.

The constituent parts of Anonymous are made up of a rapidly evolv-
ing framework of moralfaggotry, trolling’, anonymously-authored action
and lulz for lulz sake. Identifying the birth of Anonymous is in itself prob-
lematic due to the very nature of its name - existing as a vehicle by which
any gathering of individuals can identify, whether for ethically motivated
micro protest or raids for the sake of individual life-ruination. Perhaps
this is best represented in the case of Jessi Slaughter, a Youtube tween,
targeted for a raid in 2010, for her self-aggrandising yet naive videos in
which she proclaimed to her haters “Tl pop a glock in your mouth and
make a brain slushie”. This quickly provoked rage in the 4chan commu-
nity, resulting in a torrent of abuse, pizza orders and Jessi’s home address
being circulated online.

Attacks are typically carried out in the form of DDoS attacks”®,
orchestrated with the tool Low Orbit Iron Cannon, coordinated through
Internet Relay Chat**. LOIC allows a large group to collectively overload
a site’s server and bandwidth capacity, taking the site offline. Although
most attacks are based in the virtual, typical tactics within raids attempt
to make an individual or organisation’s existence a misery through
whatever means possible, be it unpaid take-away deliveries from every
store in the city to their address or calling in bomb threats to a location
where the individual organisation is known to be. Within the amoral
frame of the rules of the internet everything is permissable, providing
it results in lulz.

Prior to the poorly researched public outing of Anonymous as a
known entity by the mass media (in an attempt to elucidate the cyber
activities of the Wikileaks saga), the group has been responsible for count-
less hacktivist based political actions. Too numerous to detail in full, the
most successful long term projects of the group are commonly recog-
nised as Chanology (the ongoing cyberwar on Scientology) and Operation
Titstorm: the attacks on the Australian government's websites and the tar-
geting of individual politicians as a response to the government's attempt

ALL THE MEMES OF PRODUCTION

to censor the internet. Operation Payback targeted the MPAA (Motion

Pictures Association of America) which was attempting the digital priva-
tisation and enforced copyrighting of easily available online content, as

well as repeated attempts to shut down the p2p torrent directory The Pirate

Bay. It was Operation Payback that swiftly evolved to support Wikileaks

during their disclosure of diplomatic cables, attacking Mastercard, Paypal

and Amazon for their withdrawal of services from the organisation.

This marked the start of a difficult shift in motivational factors for
Anonymous and the 4chan community. No longer were lulz the deter-
mining factor in actions- instead, in true meme-development fashion,
another layer of meaning had entered the equation. As the populations
of North African and Middle-Eastern countries rose up in (partly online
organised) insurrection, Anonymous began to draw links between previ-
ous political actions, such as Operation Titstorm, which focused on the
hacker-inspired defence of internet sovereignty and freedom of informa-
tion, and its concrete relationship with IRL political change. The defence
of Wikileaks, for example, could no longer be sustained as an autarchic,
purely online action happening in a political vacuum. Wikileaks was
having very real repercussions in Tunisia and Egypt, and it was at this
point where Anonymous began a series of Operations, including provid-
ing advice for activists on avoiding state surveillance online, recipes for
antidotes to tear gas, connecting video livestreams and info sheets lifted
directly from the boards of 4chan. In the final instance, Anonymous
worked to restore internet access via dialup connections and proxies to
Egypt when the panicking regime “turned off the net”.

The decision by Anonymous to undertake these actions was a result of
its organisational processes. Due to its (nominally) non-hierarchical dis-
cussion process, combining polling and free conversation on IRC around
the issues, and the consensus decision-making process, Anonymous could
legitimately move as a group from taking action based on meme humour
and start to take action as a response to human rights abuses and govern-
mental repression, without cracking due to internal pressure, or under
the weight of its own contradictions. Hackers could opt out, dissenting
voices could be heard, but, ultimately, effective action could be taken. The
meme of raids had fundamentally altered and evolved due to changing
social conditions. That’s not to say the original quest for lulz was entirely
destroyed-plenty of chat revolved around the trope “LOL FALTERING

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

REGIME, let's hit it till it breaks”- but in terms of primary motivation,
Lulz had been superceded by Sincerity.

The fascinating case study of Anonymous is just one example of how
memes are more than a theory of information, but a concrete form in
themselves. But in terms of the potential of these organisational forms,
Anonymous is just an encouraging, if problematic, start. It is indicative
of a changing political understanding, as highlighted by Paul Mason, in
a generation entirely removed from the political landscapes of the Cold
War. We will move beyond Anonymous in the coming years, as techno-
logical literacy spreads beyond the geeks into the general population, and
these forms become the default for young agitators and other discontents
of neoliberalism, rather than the more rigid structures of old ideologies.
The somewhat chaotic, rhizomatic manifestations of Anonymous politi-
cal actions foreground the collapse of the concept of programmatic politi-
cal movements, favouring instead a multiplicity of struggles. We are not
compulsive recidivists, nostalgic for massed, unified throngs driven on
by demagogues. We are more than happy to see this tactical shift, away
from intrinsically authoritarian notion of “political unity”, if it is to be
replaced with class unity. We don't see this decentralisation of power and
authority in determining the direction of actions to be a negative impact of
technology. Memetics offer an opportunity for the instigation of autono-
mous actions, delivering death by a thousand cuts to our enemy.

Finally we offer a very telling short anecdote, regarding the two con-
tradictory drivers of memes, lulz and sincerity, that caught our attention
earlier in the year. When union members and activists occupied the State
Capitol in Winsconsin in an impressive defence of collective bargaining
rights, it received global attention, not least because of live streaming
of the occupation and a tech-savvy bunch of activists inside the Capitol.
Reports started to come through of supporters worldwide ordering pizzas
from the local pizzeria for those camped inside the building. Ian’s Pizza's
soon set up a blackboard to chart these small acts of solidarity, and they
became a meme in their own right. Soon pizzas were being delivered to
these North American labour activists from across the Middle East and
Europe, and even China. This seemed like an important symbolic shift in
the power of memes, to us. When 4chan began making raids, a staple of
their arsenal was to bombard their victims with hundreds of unwanted,
unpaid-for pizzas. Now, the pre-paid pizza slices arrived in their thousands,

ALL THE MEMES OF PRODUCTION

as a gesture of a shared struggle against neoliberalism. Memes have the

capability to drop their amoral, malicious impetus, and become forms of
political struggle, practical and moral support and solidarity. Where once

Memes + Lulz = Terror, perhaps today Memes + Sincerity = Communism-
or, at least, a step in the right direction.

NOTES

An imageboard is an internet message board predominantly used for the posting
and reposting of images.

4chan message boards are organised alphabetically /b/ board represents the random
board and is where most site traffic is driven. As a result of the nature of infantile/
offensive content posted /b/ boarders often affectionately refer to themselves and
others as btards or ./b/tard.

The hivemind is a concept of the form of collective intelligence created when
large numbers of autonomous users operate within decentralized or self-directing
networks.

“LOL’ has become one of the most popular acronyms developed for ease of communi-
cations on online and short message services (including text messaging). Originally
meaning “laugh out loud”, it now conveys a general sentiment of amusement or
humour. In youth culture it is also used IRL - often heavily ironically. The past
tense of “LOL is “lolled”.

Raids are carried out when the hivemind assembles to attack a single individual,
government or organisation, raids usually escalate in scope rapidly and are often
begun by dropping dox (finding real life addresses/names/telephone numbers of
the target).

Part of the internal social disciplining structure within 4chan are the concept of

“Fags” - “fag” connoting disapproval rather than actively implying homosexuality.

These are given prefixes according to the nature of the action of which the commu-
nity might disapprove - i.e. “GaiaFags”, “NewFags” (newer, niave members).

A good example of this is the meme “in ur base killin ur doodz”. The original meme

was based on images from computer games where one player had infiltrated another
players base and is proceeding to kill his characters (doodz). The joke was a brag.
Today the image has been replaced so many times, and the slogan altered, that the

original context is now irrelevant, as long as the user references the meme itself
with the phrase - “in ur XXXX, XXXXin ur XXXX”. If you want a taste, google

image search “I'm in ur’.

IRL= “In real life”, an acronym used to differentiate between experiencing reality in

fleshy first life, as opposed to reality observed through the filter of contemporary

technology.

Internet slang for the act of posting inflammatory extraneous, or off-topic messages

in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary

intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting

normal on-topic discussion.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

10 DDoS Attack =A Distributed Denial of Service Attackis an attack on a website carried

out by flooding the host server with requests from multiple (usually tens of thou-
sands) of users. Prior to the use of Low Orbit Iron Cannon these were previously

carried out by large botnets.

IRC is an acronym for Internet Relay Chat, a chatroom platform developed in 1988

for group discussion, it is supported across all platforms but requires a softwarecli-
ent such as mIRC in order to participate.

If you don't let us dream,
we won't let you sleep?

Ben Lear & Raph Schlembach

sonal experience of the crisis. For many, the future looks decid-

edly bleaker than it has done for a long time. For us this subjective
experience of the failure of the capitalist promise of unending growth and
luxury underpins much of the unrest occurring across the globe. Whilst
this experience changes across space - indeed some parts of the world
are experiencing strong, continued growth - we see important political
commonalities emerging. What connects our struggles is the rage we feel
as our social wealth and dignity is attacked. These connections are not,
however, unproblematic. Whilst we are connected through our hope for
a better future, our task will be to ensure our hope and energy is not side-
tracked into struggling for more work and less prosperity.

P oint nine of Paul Mason's “Twenty Reasons’ highlights the per-

I. PROMISE
“Marx was right. Marx was right all along!”
— placard on national demonstration against education cuts

What is the “capitalist promise” whose failure is leading to our struggles?
We see the capitalist promise as the political and social forms of legit-
imisation which capitalist development relies upon. These forms are
expressed differently across space and class, from the “American dream”
to Ed Miliband’s “British promise” “that the next generation would always
do better than the last” and the dream of export based development. The
promise of capital is that of unending growth, and the redistribution or

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

trickle down of that wealth. Tied into this promise of wealth are ideas
of accessible education, social mobility, paid employment, secure jobs,
freedom from debt and improvement upon previous generations. The
underpinning of the capitalist promise is the belief in the ability of capital
to provide social security and the means to a good life. This promise, our
expectations of capital and thus the horizons of our potential futures, have
been shaped by previous generations - through what was won, through
what appeared possible in previous times. In Europe this is informed by
the nostalgic, sepia-toned memory of the Fordist era, replete with prom-
ises of full employment, family wage and mass consumption. This isn’t
a case of false consciousness, of conspiracy or of capitalist “lies”, but the
outcome of the ways in which people invest the society they find them-
selves in with the hope for a better, more comfortable and enjoyable life.

This promise, as already mentioned, varies over time, across space
and between different social groups. However, Paul Mason identifies the
graduate without a future as a key international actor in recent struggles.
Many students enroll at university in the hope of getting a better job at
the end of it, a hope that is becoming increasingly unlikely as the crisis
deepens and leaves large proportions of populations structurally unem-
ployable. In North Africa and the Arab world, decades of developmen-
tal policies implemented by nationalist strongmen and autocratic mon-
archs have not delivered Western levels of wealth beyond a privileged elite.
Those gains that have occurred are now under threat as oil and food prices
rise and Western consumer spending falls. As well as being a struggle for
democracy the “Arab Spring” is also a revolt against poverty, expressed in
rising food prices and a lack of jobs.

What unites the experiences of student protests, labour movements
and the Arab Spring, then, are their relationships to the capitalist promise.
Our problem with capitalism isn't the system’s “greed” or the over-con-
sumption of seemingly “passive citizens”, but the way in which wealth
is produced and distributed which leads to empty homes, unused swim-
ming pools and rusting unsold cars produced by under-paid workers living
debt-financed lives. Imagining ways out of our current political and eco-
nomic situation does not, and should not, entail a move towards austerity,
be that enforced or voluntary. Our problem with capitalism is not that it
produces an abundance of wealth but that it is incapable of fulfilling this
promise for all but a privileged few.

IF YOU DON'T LET US DREAM, WE WON'T LET YOU SLEEP?

II. BETRAYAL
Why did Nick Clegg cross the road?
Because he said he wouldn't.
— popular joke about Deputy Prime Minister

Economic crisis and enforced austerity, combined with environmental
crises and rising oil and food prices appear to be challenging the capitalist
promise. Here in the UK the government is using the crisis as the pretext
for dramatic cuts to public spending complemented by moves towards
marketisation of key public sectors; most controversially higher educa-
tion and health. Economists predict that any recovery that may occur
will be a jobless recovery; workplaces are being “rationalised” with many
positions being permanently removed and/or being replaced with precar-
ious, overworked temporary and contract roles. Much of the burden of
this structural adjustment is being borne by young people (in April 20u1,
1in 5 of 16-25 year olds in Britain were reportedly unemployed) - trade
unions are already talking of a lost generation.

Between us, the authors, having spent more than 1 years in higher edu-
cation, we still have little hope of moving beyond underpaid, undervalued,
under-stimulating contract work. As the university re-structures and per-
manent, secure workis replaced by more precarious, target-driven research
we have seen our own aspirations and plans forthe future dwindle away. We
see many young people in a similar if not worse position than us. For those of
us in the streets during the student demonstrations of the winter of 2010/11
this sense of betrayal was tangible. These were moments of convergence in
which our individual feelings of betrayal found collective form. However, we
believe the feeling of betrayal extends beyond those involved in the education
system directly. The seeming common sense of “work hard, get a good job
and live a happy life”, repeated in job centres and by “lifestyle management”
gurus, no longer stands up to scrutiny. For the recently unemployed, or those
facing longer hours for less pay, the dream of wealth and security has been
betrayed. The sense of social betrayal, of the end of the capitalist promise
of wealth in return for discipline and hard work has become generalised.

Perhaps one of the best examples of how this betrayal has been
expressed here in the UK is the curious rise and fall of Clegg-O-Mania.
In the run up to the general election in May 2010 Nick Clegg was seen by
many as a breath of fresh air and an alternative to stale party politics. After

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

the elections Clegg became a focus of the Take Back Parliament campaign,
the UK’s purple movement, which sought electoral reform and had famous
musician Billy Bragg as one of their strongest advocates. At one demon-
stration, to cheers from the crowd, Clegg explained “I've campaigned for
a better, more open, more transparent, new politics, every single day of
this general election campaign. I genuinely believe it is in the national
interest”. At this moment the Liberal Democrats were truly seen as an
alternative to the self-interested, untrustworthy politics of the other two
parties, an example that parliamentary politics could work.

However, by the time of the student protests and the Liberal Democrats
having backtracked on their pledge to protect higher education, alongside
the first wave of cuts, the situation had changed. Whilst the placards and
banners still had Nick Clegg’s face on them the message now read “Nick
Clegg we know you, youre a fucking Tory too”. Many had seen the Liberal
Democrats as allies in the struggle against rising tuition fees and a buffer
from the cuts and were furious at their subsequent lack of fidelity. In terms
of the student struggles the Liberal Democrat betrayal convinced many
people that political parties could not be trusted to defend social rights.
The promise of a break with traditional party politics was betrayed bru-
tally and “Clegging” entered the vocabulary of many, with the youth slang
website urbandictionary describing it as “The process of having sold out,
especially to a system or body that directly undermines the principles and
values you have long adhered to’. The rise and fall of Nick Clegg echoes the
larger, more structural, slipping away of the capitalist promise of wealth.

The broken promise of unending growth and progress is now a reality.
Although we are not “all in this together” it is a reality that cuts across
many social positions, from the unemployed youth in North Africa to
European students graduating with tens of thousands of pounds of debt
and little hope of a job to pay it off. The crisis is being felt subjectively as
a betrayal of the promise of development and growth.

III. DESPAIR
“Fuck this, I'm moving to Scotland”
— placard at student protest on Parliament Square

Nick Clegg’s betrayal indicates that this is not just an economic crisis. This
is also a crisis of democracy and representation. We have all experienced

IF YOU DON'T LET US DREAM, WE WON'T LET YOU SLEEP?

sentiments of despair and impotence, unable to think how we could find
our voices heard. Herbert Marcuse, the great theorist of a previous gener-
ation of student protesters, wrote that the “containment of social change
is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society”
(One Dimensional Man). We can, at times, still appreciate this feeling of
one-dimensionality.

When hundreds of thousands marched “for the alternative” in
London, what was this alternative that we were putting forward? Listening
to those slowly making their way along Embankment, meandering into
Hyde Park, we often heard arguments that begun with “of course, some
cuts are necessary, but...” Current debate seems to question the speed and
scale of austerity measures, not their inevitability. The TUC organisers
themselves saw the day as an expression of opposition to the “fast, deep
public services cuts”, ademand for a more just way of administering public
debt and dealing with recession, through job creation and “sustainable
growth”. We are trapped in a logic in which the only apparent response
to crisis is the equal distribution of the burden and more workin the hope
of stimulating new growth.

Outside of the political parties and segments of the institutional left
we are witnessing the rise of populist politics. Unions, NGOs and social
movements such as UK Uncut are calling for the implementation of redis-
tributive policies such as increased financial regulation and higher taxa-
tion of the super rich (such as the Tobin Tax). Whilst these movements
are useful in highlighting the structural inequality of capitalism, and pro-
viding a pole of attraction for angry people, we feel they fall short politi-
cally. The crisis of capital won't be stopped by recovering taxes lost to legal
loopholes nor to tightening regulation.

This seeming unwillingness to imagine bigger political alternatives
is contributing to the sense of despair and rage that many of us feel. The
future has been made one-dimensional; all that remains is more of the
same, for less reward. As long as our alternatives focus on the negotia-
tion of wealth distribution, it is no more than a rearranging of the social
condition of the present.

Our hypothesis is clear; society is capable of containing, or recuper-
ating, our criticism and our rage. But also, and the point of Paul Mason's
twenty theses is to show exactly this, there is reason to think that new
possibilities are opening up that allow our criticisms to resonate further

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

than they have before, possibly to the extent that they may rupture this
one-dimensionality. These possibilities exist both within and beyond the
post-political condition of the present.

The political task that we have before us is to move beyond this despair,
in both its personal and collective dimensions, and re-negotiate the basis
of our hope, not in capitalist development, but in its confrontation and
eventual abolishment. The exciting possibilities and potentials we see
within existing moments of resistance serve as inspiration and encour-
agement that this impossibility is a potential future yet to come.

IV. HOPE
‘I thought we were going to Alton Towers”
— placard on national demonstration against education cuts

Where is the element of hope that spurs thousands into action, world-
wide and across social strata?

We've been presented with a narrative of hope turned into despair;
the capitalist promise of growth unfolding into a nightmare of cuts and
austerity. And yet, within the one-dimensionality of capitalist existence
lies hope. Hope not because of a transcendental possibility of salvation,
not because of an ontological revolutionary outside, but because of a move-
ment that grows out of the very condition of despair. Hope is not utopian,
in the etymological sense of a non-place, but it is dialectical; it is already
here. Capitalist accumulation entails within it the very possibility of its
collapse. So we need to invert the hope-despair narrative and trace how,
through our subjective experiences of crisis and despair, we emerge with
new collective hopes and desires.

Our hope is also non-utopian in the sense that we are not in the busi-
ness of painting detailed pictures of what a post-capitalist society will look
like. That does not mean that we cannot imagine or experiment with social
relationships that are not dominated by the logic of accumulation and val-
orisation. But it does mean that we are not concerned with the details of
who will clear the rubbish off our streets in a post-capitalist society - an
obsession that appears perverse in a world where millions survive only
on rubbish. What we do say when we talk about an alternative is that we
reject the logic of capital. The vision of a post-capitalist world is not one
of paradise; we cannot imagine a world without problems and conflicts.

IF YOU DON'T LET US DREAM, WE WON'T LET YOU SLEEP?

But we can, and must, imagine a future where the production of wealth
is no longer tied to class divisions and the labour relation. Generalising
this re-understanding of hope and progress as against and beyond capital
is the key political task that we face.

Hope means more to us than just a defence of the present state of
affairs from an onslaught of cuts and economic readjustment. We need
to think about our desires not as individual aspirations to protect our lives
from change, but consider seriously the possibility of controlling our col-
lective future. Take last winter’s student protests in the UKas an example.
Do we really want to defend the university system as it stood before the
Browne Review? We would suggest that the students demanded more than
that: an education that was not tied to the market, an end to the elitism of
the sector, a life of learning that was not instrumental for success on the
labour market. And it was those demands that related their protests to
the hopes and desires of the anarchists in Greece, the youth movements
in Egypt, or the unionists in Wisconsin.

Our hope, in this sense, cannot be equated to a bourgeois pursuit of
individual happiness. The possibility of a better life for all lies not simply
in the demand for a more equal distribution of capitalist commodities.
It lies in the recognition that capital simply cannot fulfil its promise.
Ultimately, we can’t be afraid to make “luxury for all” the central demand
of our movement. In order to make this desire a reality, we need to recog-
nise that “we are the alternative’; that wealth creation can be organised
as a collective endeavour in which we shape our own history, where we
are not the co-managers of capital, but the social movement that aims to
abolish the conditions of its own enslavement.

The revenge of the remainder

Camille Barbagallo & Nicholas Beuret

Revolution, Paul Mason articulates his contemporary revolutionary

figure: the graduate without a future.* This figure stalks the world
stage, bringing down regimes in North Africa and spearheading resist-
ance to “structural adjustment” and austerity in Europe. Yet a closer look
at the actual life of this figure reveals it to be just one instance of life as
a remainder. A condition endured by the mass of surplus bodies living
without a future, living the general condition of being without hope that
neoliberal capitalism has brought into being.

Over the last 40 years the world has seen the birth of a new kind of
worker - a worker bereft of work. Workers who inhabit precarity and are
deemed to be superfluous to the requirements of capital.” Be they the excess
of educated and work-ready bodies in the world’s metropolises, or the multi-
tude of hungry and feared bodies in the slums that encircle the urban centres
of the post-colonial world, these bodies are surplus to requirements - they
are the remainder of capital’s calculus.* We can trace this surplus mass
of bodies, its contours and manifestations. In doing so, the act of tracing
reveals something fundamental about “being surplus’. The form, specifi-
cally the body that comes into focus is a part of the unfolding crisis in which
we find ourselves, as both subject and object, its reason and its consequence.

| ae memories of impoverished lawyers in Paris during the French

CONTOURS AND SHADOWS...
Nearly half of the population in Britain who are aged between 18-65 are
“precarious .* Which is to say that their work and social life is increasingly

THE REVENGE OF THE REMAINDER

uncertain, poorly remunerated, causal and subject to sudden change.*
They live in a world of permanent underemployment and insecurity. This

precarious population includes around one third of all recent university

graduates° and an army of working poor, including a quarter of a million

workers who are paid less than the minimum wage.’ We live in a period

of increasing “necessary unemployment”, characterised by the rise of the

informal economy.* The informal economy is posited in this instance as

the economic sphere beyond the formal capitalist realm. It is estimated

to be worth upwards of £137 billion per year, providing employment for

as many as 3.6 million people in Britain.°®

In addition, more than being precarious, almost one quarter of the
British population aged 18-65 are “economically inactive” - that is to say,
excluded from waged work. *° This figure includes the one million women
who have left or been expelled from the labour market since global eco-
nomic crisis began in 2008. This abandonment by capital manifests most
dramatically in those classified as “NEETs” - people who are “not in edu-
cation, employment or training”. One in six 16-24 year olds (and almost
one in five 18-24 year olds) fall into this population, which is currently
one million strong and set to rise.** The problem is certainly not con-
fined to Britain: within the “wealthy countries” of the G20, the last three
years has seen 20 million more bodies added to the category of the unem-
ployed.” This growing population who are left without work, coupled
with a hidden informal workforce and the precarious bodies of graduates
and the underemployed constitute the emergence of a permanent surplus
population - a reminder.

The rising insecurity and precarity of life is also apparent in the new
forms of poverty that have emerged in Britain as capital and the state try
to explain that they can no longer afford us all. Five million households
live in “fuel poverty”, unable to afford heating, “water poverty” affects four
million households’? and a new “food divide” defines who can eat what,
with dramatic implications for their health.

Beyond the ever more militarised borders of Europe lies a world
increasingly determined by the growing volume of surplus bodies and by
the battle to contain them. Over 1 billion people now dwell in the world’s
slums and the number is likely to grow to 2 billion by 2030.*° The infor-
mal economy accounts for the economic activity of almost three quarters
of the world’s workforce outside of the centres of wealth accumulation

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

(and also for 15 percent within them). In addition to this space of the eco-
nomically marginalised, the global unemployed now number over 200
million, with many more not officially counted. Ultimately, we can trace
the shape of this surplus life in the sheer mass of the hungry. There are
930 million malnourished bodies throughout the world, not for lack of
food but for lack of money: there exists enough food to feed them all one
and a half times over.

Even though it is radically differentiated depending on where in the
world the body is found, beyond the sheer volume of surplus bodies there
exists a simple and common relation - of waged work to survival. Which
is to say that the millions of bodies who are the surplus population need
the wage to survive, but they lack sufficient work, or sufficient guaran-

tees of work. As a result their lives sit precariously balanced between life
and death.

TOO MANY, TOO MUCH
Start from the beginning. Each year, year after year, fewer workers produce
more commodities as labour becomes more productive. Productivity is
a curve, arching towards the sky, cumulatively reducing the number of
workers needed for any one process or workplace. A simple example: last
year ten workers were needed to produce one shoe. This year only eight.
And soit goes, on and on. Hence, if capital stands still, ifit fails to continue
to expand there emerges a problem, one of a shrinking number of workers/
consumers, and a growing mass of unsold commodities and unutilised
capital. Accordingly, year after year, the number of workplaces, markets
and consumers must grow. Grow or die - such is capital’s imperative.**®
If capital doesn't expand, the unsold, unused and unemployed will only
grow while waiting for an eventual crisis to sweep it all away in an orgy of
destruction. So more - more factories, more commodities, more markets
- must be created. But it is also workers who are dependent on capitalist
expansion in the form of more jobs. If capital stands still it not only pro-
duces a growing mass of unsold commodities and unutilised capital but
also a shrinking number of jobs. As labour increases its productivity it
makes itself redundant, and can only find more work in new industries,
factories or territories. If it can't, then it is free to starve. For the workers of
capitalism are those bodies who have been “freed” from any other means
of subsistence than the wage.

THE REVENGE OF THE REMAINDER

Let’s come at it again. Capital needs bodies to work, to produce and
ultimately to consume. It can only encounter those bodies if there exist
bodies who need to work and must buy in order to consume. Until rela-
tively recent times, the vast majority of the world’s population produced,
under different regimes, enough to subsist. They did not need to go out to
seek a wage to buy the means of their own reproduction. The process of
creating capital’s workers is the bloody process of destroying other means
of life: appropriating or destroying the means of reproduction outside of
the wage relation.*” The enclosure of communal lands and the destruc-
tion of indigenous civilizations had to occur and must continue to occur
in order for capital to grow and therefore survive. It must destroy those
rights that exist in opposition to the only rights recognised by capital: the
right to work, the right to starve and the right to choose between them.
The ongoing process of dispossession creates workers simply because, dis-
possessed, they must work for a wage to survive. It also creates a steady
stream of wealth (be it gold or oil; fish or knowledge) that fuels the fires
of accumulation. This dispossession sows the seeds of capital’s growth.
Capital chases itself around the globe, destroying other ways of life in
new territories, opening up the possibility of new markets in which to
sell commodities where once there was subsistence, and in doing so reaps
the harvest of capital beyond the limits of existing markets.

This expansion takes place not just in space but also in time. Here
debt enters into the calculus, as amechanism that allows capital to move
between the future and the present. Debt provides the means by which
workers can buy today what they will earn tomorrow. Just as capital
seeks to harvest new territories, debt enables a harvesting of the future.
But, at some point, the books must balance and the debt must be paid
or look as though it will be paid. The present must return in the future as
more of the same. It is the balancing of the books that drives the system
into crisis. For while a frontier exists - more bodies, resources and terri-
tory and so a balance of forces can be maintained through on one hand,
growth and expansion and on the other, ever more productivity. But
without an outside to incorporate, an outside that continues to exist, it
is impossible to keep the books balanced.** Because no growth means no
new markets and also no new investment opportunities, jobs or avenues
of development. Without a frontier, capital ends up exhausting the pos-
sibilities of the spaces it already inhabits, eventually entering into crisis.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

It is precisely this moment of impossibility that we have arrived at, and
not for the first time. *”

RETURN TO THE START

An ever-growing mass of surplus bodies find themselves starving amidst

plenty, while capital runs out of profitable avenues of investment.
Mountains of debt pile up next to unused machinery and unsold prod-
ucts while workers are unable to find work, piling misery upon misery as

all kinds of poverty abound and grow. What was this moment’s genesis?

Forged ina series of trends, tendencies and circumstance, the current sit-
uation we find ourselves in was brought into being when a threshold was

crossed in 2006 with the subprime debt crisis in the USA.

This tipping point was produced by three factors. First, a greater
global demand for the raw materials of production and consumption com-
bined with a reduced supply of them increased the basic cost of living in
the USA (though, to be sure not only there). Second, massive inflows of
speculative capital into a range of different markets, most importantly
into those that “managed” housing mortgages (especially the so-called

“subprime” mortgages) and basic commodity markets, looking for returns
free from the fetters of decreasingly profitable material production (again
increasing the cost of living and the cost of doing business). Third, a
greater reliance on the market by the world’s population with the reduc-
tion of non-market mechanisms of reproduction (such as the welfare
state or exchange, barter and subsistence). All three of these factors led
to a squeeze on incomes - waged and unwaged - to create a surge in the
cost of living.”° This led directly to the collapse of the ability of the USA
working class to pay its debts, especially that section of the working class
that were always precariously balanced on the edge of poverty. This col-
lapse, coupled with volatile and deregulated international markets, set off
a chain reaction of panic and uncertainty as to the actual “worth” of the
pile of debts, derivatives, futures and other arcane financial instruments
in the world’s financial markets that has yet to completely play itself out.

A growing world population reliant on markets for their every need
hit a limit: only so much raw material, only so many factories and refin-
eries, so much oil, food, water, etc. can be created. There is only somuch
world to put to work. It was certainly not a lack of bodies but a lack of
materials for those bodies to work with that started to drive up prices,

THE REVENGE OF THE REMAINDER

especially of food and basic commodities. The massive increase in the
hungry, homeless and poor in the lead up to and through the crisis speaks
to the successful destruction of economies outside of capitalism. To be
sure, feedback mechanisms such as climate change, desertification and
pollution all helped squeeze the “environmental supply”. Financial specu-
lation played its part too. But it is ultimately the combination of the need
for growth and the lack of life outside of capitalism that caused so much
hunger. This lack of raw materials also hints at the reasons for the explo-
sion of speculative and financial activity.

Ours is a world running out of profitable avenues for investment, one
in which speculation reveals itself as the only place left to generate profit.
The future is mortgaged, but payment is always eventually due. And this
payment plan is one that requires bodies to work, to consume, to create
debts and ultimately to pay when the bill is due. This mortgaging of the
future ran ahead of itself, got too far beyond what would ever be earned
or could ever be paid. Without the space to expand, or the consumers to
spend, there was no hope of loans being honoured.

The spark that lit the fires in the streets was both the neoliberal assault
on the future prospects of a large part of the population in the world’s
wealthy countries and the further impoverishment of the precarious
and surplus bodies of the world. It was the combined effects of too much
capital, too many workers and not enough new frontiers for expansion
that caused a shortage of raw materials and the means of reproducing
life. It is this spark that connects Somali pirates, driven to piracy by the
destruction of their fisheries, to the food riots around the globe in 2008,
to the revolutions in North Africa, to the demands for higher wages in
China, to the riots in Britain and across much of Europe. This crisis - a
crisis of the very relationship between labour and capital - signals the
reaching of limits, of processes that have come to their terminus and
given birth to the figures of the remainder we see stalking the world stage
today - which includes the graduate without a future to be sure, but also
the surplus population that dwells at the margins that are quickly becom-
ing the centre of our world.

A QUESTION OF CONTROL
At the edge, bereft of frontiers for expansion or opportunities to invest and
with a decline in the need for labour, the question that haunts capital is no

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

longer how to put bodies to work, but how to control and contain those
bodies excessive to the work available. For us, workers without wages or
security of income, the question is no longer seizing the means of pro-
duction - production as it stands only renders us superfluous and under-
mines life itself. For us the question is how do we once again reproduce
ourselves beyond the wage. This world of control is characterised by the
rising importance of a politics of abandonment and containment, which
according to Achille Mmembe can be conceived of as “necropolitics” -
where death and not life is the function of governance.”*

With a surplus population, managing death is the core concern of
political activity. One of the key political tasks is allowing them to die
without endangering the section of the social body that must remain
productive. Surplus humanity - the bodies dwelling in slums, ghettos,
refugee camps, prisons, old people’s homes, remand centres, disaster
zones like New Orleans and Fukushima” and of course all those exist-
ing in the informal economy that are beyond any utility for capital - it is
these bodies that are abandoned at as little cost as possible. This is necro-
politics: the politics of containment and abandonment in a world without
resources beyond the market.

This practice of allowing people to “fall behind” operates through a
range of practices and discourses centred on a kind of Darwinian racism: a
purity of ideas perfectly matched to the rhetoric of neoliberalism and the
“right to be unequal” held so dear. Necropolitics operates through diffused
institutions - private companies, aid and disaster relief bodies, personal
militias and government agencies. It creates a series of fragmented territo-
ries that disable mobility - territories in both the physical (slums, estates
and prisons) and social sense (as in the idea of hoodies or welfare cheats).

Walled off and policed, these territories are maintained separately
from those spaces deemed productive. Through a permanent state of siege
the borders are maintained by either postcolonial policing (racial profil-
ing, stop and search powers, ASBOs, anti-gang activities etc.), economic
exclusion (such as redlining, or lack of educational facilities) or ideological
public campaigns of shame and stigmatisation (against the unemployed,
the migrant, the diseased or disabled). For all the differences that exist
between exclusion through ASBOs vs containment via migration regimes
or precarious service industry work vs informal micro-credit debt, the
underlying logic is the same: contain, fragment, isolate and abandon.

THE REVENGE OF THE REMAINDER

Kept apart as less than fully human, as not able to contribute, as a threat
and contagion, these bodies are then allowed to die. Slowly. Inch by inch.
Through hunger, ill health, disaster, gang violence, poverty and disease.
This is the fate outlined by capital for one third of humanity today.

REVENGE

Contrary to the story of disaster relief operations, just wars and those
that would put “more cops on the streets’, this crisis cannot be solved
through legitimate means; justice will not prevail. A balance of forces
cannot be struck because there is a limit to justice. The limits to justice
are ultimately configured by what it is: an ethical practice, grounded in
the exercise of some legitimate authority, aimed at restoring a balance, or
business as usual. But what sort of justice can be entertained today when
the processes at work either destines us to a life abandoned, awaiting a
meaningless death, or balanced precariously on the edge? There can be
no hope of bringing back some kind of Keynesian social pact, nor should
we want one. For it was built on the unwaged and devalued labour of
women, the underwaged labour of bodies in the colonies, not to mention
the existence of an environmental abundance of resources that no longer
exists. No, there is no going back, nor is there any kind of deal that can
be struck. Justice is not possible.

Only revenge is possible. By revenge we mean the inflicting of wounds
so grave that our enemy suffers more than we do. A hatred of capital is nec-
essary, but a rage to injure and inflict revenge from below is also required.
Yet alongside this necessary violence, a process of salvage is needed. At
this juncture, the question must no longer be one of better terms within a
system that will only confine us to an ever-worsening condition, but one
of escape. An armed escape. We must return to the fundamental ques-
tion of life beyond the wage. We must seize the means of reproduction,
violently, and with a hatred of a life enslaved.

NOTES

1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/o2/twenty_reasons_why_
its_kicking. html.

2 However, contrary to Mason’s argument, organised labour remains a force actively
resisting the rule of neoliberal capitalism. Many of the recent revolts, from the
occupation of Tory Party headquarters at Millbank in 2010, to Tahrir Square and
the worldwide #occupy movements in 2011, intimately involved union organisation

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

and the labour movement. In Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization
Since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2003), Beverley Silver argues
that the proportionally dwindling formal labour workforce is still organising and
is still a force to be reckoned with. See for the example of truckers in China: http://
www. wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/pers-a30. shtml.

There have been an increasing body of work that addresses the concept of a
surplus humanity, including Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006),
Achille Mmembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15 (1): 11-40, Rethinking Capitalist
Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism,
ed. Kalyan Sanyal (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007), Michael Denning, “Wageless Life”,
New Left Review 66, November-December 2010, and Endnotes, 2, “Misery and the
Value Form’. In his notion of “the second contradiction of capital”, James O'Connor
develops the idea of the necessity of an abundance of bodies outside of the formal
capitalist economy in connection with the concept of an environmental surplus.
http://precariousunderstanding. blogsome.com/2007/01/05/
precarious-precarization-precariat/.

This destabilization of life where there was once security under the welfare or devel-
opmental state is not simply a return to an earlier epoch of capitalism; or, rather, it
is both a return and a departure, as we will see. It is the development of a mode of
life far from past avenues of escape (to new towns, workplaces, frontiers or colo-
nies) or non-capitalist modes of subsistence (from communal land to familial rela-
tions). This lack of open space and other means of life, as well as a massive increase
in environmental degradation and transformation, mark this situation as one dif-
ferent to past periods of generalised insecurity. See 13 below.

http: //www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2656219/One-third-of-graduates-do-not-
benefit-from-having-a-degree-report-says. html.

http://www. statistics. gov. uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=591.

International Labour Organisation, http: //www.ilo.org/infeco.

http://www. futurematters.org.uk/drivers/informaleconomy.asp.

http://www. statistics. gov. uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=12.

http://www. guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/24/young-people-neets-record-high.
“Report warns of deepening global jobs crisis”, http://www. wsws.org/articles/2011/
sep2011/jobs-s28. shtml.

http://www. guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/20/water-poverty-ulcscarcity-bills.
http: //news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4652801.stm.

Davis, Planet of Slums.

David Harvey, Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2007).

Karl Marx, Capital (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), Silvia Federici, Caliban and
the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), Midnight Notes 10, “The New Enclosures”
(1990), Harvey, Limits to Capital.

One of the most significant and valuable “outside” spaces that is produced and main-
tained by the capitalist mode of production is the domestic household. It is in this
space that the unpaid work that reproduces life (work that is still overwhelming
performed by women) is captured by capital in a process mediated through com-
modity production - in particular, the commodity of labour-power - see Mariarosa

21
22

THE REVENGE OF THE REMAINDER

Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community
(Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975).

It’s important to note that a surplus humanity has come into being in pervious epochs.
The creation of a surplus humanity is both a cyclical and secular process - that is,
it continually reoccurs, but reoccurs in ever-greater numbers and proportions. It
comes into being when the limits of an existing world-system are reached (the physi-
cal limits, for expansion and reinvestment as well as with regards to resources), so
that whatever space constitutes the limits of a system that cannot, for that moment,
be expanded, are completely consumed, obliterating all non-capitalist space, making
further grow impossible.

Commodity prices started to creep up in price in 2003, then took off just prior to the
sub-prime crisis in 2006, resulting in a food crisis in 2007/8 and again now in 2011,
as well as fuel and other basic living cost crisis around the globe.

Achille Mmembe, “Necropolitics”.

On disaster zones as areas governed by necropolitics see Silvia Federici and George
Caffentzis, “Must We Rebuild Their Anthill? A Letter to/for Japanese Comrades”
(http: //libcom.org/library/must-we-rebuild-their-anthill-letter-tofor-japanese-com-
rades), and Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities
That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009).

Fear and loathing

David Robertshaw, Rohan Orton & Will Barker

In the case of Egypt for example, dissidents find themselves in a

position where the consequences of retreat would be costly despite
cosmetic changes at the top since the uprisings in February they remain
exposed and vulnerable - the Egyptian state has continued to crack down
on protesters in Tahrir Square, bloggers have been locked up for criticis-
ing the military, a state of emergency has been called and protests have
been banned until September. Allegations of torture are abound, amongst
others those of female protesters being forced to undergo “virginity tests”.
The notion of radicals being able to take a day off quickly appears to be a
eurocentric one in the face of this evidence.

The British, as a case in point, operate in a completely different
context to the Egyptians. Although the police and ACPO’ have been
capable of many dubious actions from a civil liberties point of view, they
come nowhere close to the widespread abuses of the Egyptian military.
The Egyptian and the British protester do not face the same consequences
if they choose to confront the state. It follows then that fears of different
types of repression are counterbalanced by different demands. As our
social contexts and compositions differ, so too our fears change. In Egypt,
a large number of people are experiencing abject poverty when faced with
the rising cost of living and when they take on the state they are risking
their lives. In Western Europe, we don't worry about being disappeared by
the military but we are frustrated by the absence of meaningful control

C an young radicals pick and choose their battles or take a day off?

over our lives.

FEAR AND LOATHING

Raoul Vaneigem made a distinction between life and survival, asking
whether we want “a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of
starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom.” With this in mind, it is
not so mucha matter of losing fear as one set of fears outweighing another.
If the thought of continuing to live in this world of mere survival becomes
more terrifying than the threat of arrest, then inaction becomes more ter-
rifying than a night in the cells or a black mark on your work record. Fear
is a matter of losses weighed against gains, and if we are to look at what
British society offers we can see how little we really have to lose.

We speak as people in our twenties and thirties, and our situation
seems to be different to that of our parents generation. Where the post-
war generation saw increases in job stability, with stronger rights in
the workplace and the establishment of a welfare state, ours has seen a
decline into precariousness. Today there are few who have any illusion
about having a job for life and even fewer who will attain such a thing.
There has been a massive reduction in permanent employment, with
an emphasis placed on greater mobility and temporary contracts. This
move towards short-term and temporary employment has been accom-
panied by a reduction in workers’ sick pay, holidays and other rights. It
can also be seen as a major cause of the stagnation or reduction of wages
for most people in this country for the past 30 years.’ Another factor
that draws heavily into this feeling of precariousness is the explosion
of debt: credit cards, mortgages and student loans have the effect of
trapping people into a greater dependence on working harder, working
longer hours and forgoing the niceties of regulation.* Precariousness
does not just exist in the realm of work (the disappearance of stable
jobs), but can also be seen in housing, welfare provision, levels of debt
and other areas of our lives.°

In the current economic climate, many graduates have been unable
to find highly paid work, or any work at all. Studying at university as a
solid investment in a stable career is becoming a difficult idea to recon-
cile with reality. Many young middle class graduates with good qualifi-
cations are finding themselves signing on, stacking supermarket shelves,
doing low skilled casual and temp work. It is difficult for those who do
succeed to ignore the fact that many of their course mates are being left
behind. Middle class parents are confronted with the fact that their chil-
dren or their friends’ children are unable to find work. Not only are their

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

children incapable of finding work but their own jobs no longer feel as
secure as they once did. Slashes to public spending have resulted in mass
redundancies and have brought this sense of precariousness to the door
of middle class white-collar workers. Even among the relatively privi-
leged, the awareness is increasing that the current system is failing them.

This awareness brings with it a sense of fear that pulls people in two
directions. On the one hand towards increased atomisation - a sense that
others pose competition to them. This creates tensions between groups.
Fear finds itself redirected to resentment and malice levelled against all
too familiar scapegoats: migrants, travellers, so-called “work shy’, or “the
greedy unions’. On the other hand, what offers more hope is that this fear
is also driving people to group together and take collective action, becom-
ing political and forgeing solidarities. Recently, we have seen this mani-
fest itself in various forms, e.g. occupations of universities and marches
against government cuts.

Changes in the stability of work have also had effects on the forms
that struggle takes. The old working-class based movements of a genera-
tion ago have by and large disappeared. The forms of organisation that
accompanied them have similarly faded away, with industrial action
increasingly viewed as a tool for the self-interested worker rather than
a manifestation of class solidarity. Today it would be hard to conceive of
strikes as the main form of mass action, union membership has declined
and the power of unions has waned since the 1980s.° In part this is due
to the legal limitations that have been placed upon the unions, including
the ban on flying pickets. However, it is also the time commitments nec-
essary for participation in unions that often appear as an insurmount-
able hurdle. Time is scarce for those working long hours to pay off debt
or keep their jobs and houses, as well as maintain their families. Raising
one’s head above the parapet by getting involved in workplace disputes is
more and more daunting to those who can so easily be cast aside by their
employers. Moreover, it is simply not an option for the temp worker, ille-
galised worker, or for the unemployed, because unions have little power
or interest in fighting for rights on their behalf.

The workforce has become increasingly mobile, passing easily not
only through a variety of companies but also through different sectors:
one month doing secretarial work for the NHS, another selling insurance
over the phone. Due to this, workers have a vested interest in the struggles

FEAR AND LOATHING

of employees in a wide number of sectors because they have been or know
that they may at some point be employed in that line of work.

This same increase in movement means that people feel less loyal to
their jobs, employers and bosses. This makes it easier to rebel, because
they have fewer emotional ties to their employer. The bosses are abstract
entities, disconnected from the individual's sense of identity. Moreover, it
is possible that this reduces the animosity that people feel towards manage-
ment for whom they are only able to muster a vague sense of resentment.

Yet, just as mobility creates more of a distance between workers and
employers, it can also result in workers experiencing a similar distance
between each other. Precariousness in the workplace can mean a diffusion
of social solidarity that stems from a collective identity. Co-workers come
and go rapidly, and the mass association of the factory floor has given way
to the atomised teams of the call centre; commitments to each other are
hard to establish. The long hours people spend at work, the increasing
death of public space and the greater geographical mobility of populations,
all cause problems for the creation of geographical and working commu-
nities. There are no local working communities any longer.

Itis not anew thought that the internet has been instrumental in cre-
ating new communities based on shared interests and common difficul-
ties, from manga enthusiasts to haemophiliacs. These online associations
are of great importance because they change how information is dissemi-
nated and how links can be made. As topics spread through Facebook and
Twitter, they provide access to much wider varieties of people than would
ever be possible via geographical or labour associations. At the same time
as advances in communication affect what is politically possible, they
also alter how people interact with politics. Communities are no longer
distinct entities, identifiable by the physical spaces that they occupy. A
single internet forum may consist of several intermingling communities,
spreading out into Instant Messaging, Facebook, Twitter and various blogs.
Identifying who exactly belongs to the community becomes impossible,
which means that questions of how and whether a community will act
are entirely unpredictable.

When resistance escapes the confines of the internet and moves from
sharing information to acting on it, there comes a tipping point where
retreat is no longer a practical option. Yet the fluidity of our relation to
the online world does promote an attitude of picking battles wisely. Blogs

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

are regularly abandoned or forums closed without much fuss. Their crea-
tors and commentators disperse, keeping some of the connections made
and losing others. New communities are created elsewhere; indeed, the
participants probably have a slew of others anyway, sitting in their book-
marks. This happens so regularly that organisation becomes perceived as
something transient, a constant process of death and rebirth as congrega-
tions change to meet changing needs. A recent example of this would be
the purging of political Facebook groups just before the Royal Wedding.’

One constant remains in all this fluidity. Although some commen-
tators will always have their opinions more highly regarded than others,
people are frequently left with the general idea that their opinions matter.
In order to belong to web-based communities it is not possible to be passive.
To be inactive is to say nothing and if someone only lurks they are invis-
ible to the community, they occupy no space there. Disagreement with
or expansion on the words of others becomes the easiest way to belong.
It promotes an environment that is the antithesis to traditional political
structures, where the directives of the hierarchy are not to be questioned
and the job of the masses is to follow where they are led. So, becoming
a pawn for rigid, dogmatic organisations becomes harder to accept. The
very processes involved in online communication push us towards ways
of thinking that go against being directed as a mere member of the rank
and file, there to fight and die as directed.

All this makes for an environment in which people can participate to
a greater or lesser extent, where participation is not as straight forward as
turning up toa picket. The “front lines” of days gone by only exist on rare
occasions, instead we have a situation where engagement cannot easily
be measured in such physical terms. Our increasing connectivity means
that struggle has become a constant aspect of our lives, even if it may not
always appear so to the outside observer. Yet, we must remain vigilant to
some of the dangers that lie before us, as it could well become all too easy
to slide into the least confrontational forms of action and remain there;
precariousness might mean we have less to lose, but what we do have is
so much easier to lose. The fear remains.

NOTES
1 The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has recently been the subject of con-
troversy after the identity of one of their undercover operatives, Mark Kennedy, was

FEAR AND LOATHING

discovered. The media uproar following revelations of Kennedy's activities prompted
the removal of ACPO’s control of their three “domestic terrorism” teams. Travis A,
Lewis P & Wainwright M, “Clean-up of covert policing ordered after Mark Kennedy
revelations” The Guardian, January 18", 201: http://www. guardian.co.uk/uk/20u1/
jan/18/covert-policing-cleanup-acpo.

Vaneigem R. The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, 2003), 18
Harvey D. (2010) The Enigma of Capital - And the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile
Books, 2010), 12.

For up to date information and statistics on UK personal debt, a good source is the
Credit Action website http://www. creditaction.org.uk/helpful-resources/debt-sta-
tistics. html.

Itis important to note that precariousness is not anew phenomenon, it is the rule to
which the post-war generations ability to find secure work and have strong rights
is the exception: throughout the history of capitalism this has been the situation
that the working classes have found themselves.

Figures charting the decline of the unions can be found in the Department of Business,
Innovation and Skills publication, Trade Union Membership 2010 http://stats. bis. gov.
uk/UKSA/tu/TUM2010.pdf.

Malik S., “Activists Claim Purge of Facebook Pages” The Guardian, April 29", 2011:
http://www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/apr/29/facebook-activist-pages-purged

A funny thing happened on
the way to the square

Thoughts in the middle of the
Athenian autumn of 2011

Antonis Vradis

omebody asks: how do your days pass in Athens? I find this a dif-
S= question. First, because I cannot even estimate whether I

spend most of my days in the Greek capital, as 1am near-constantly
displaced between Athens, London and elsewhere. But second - and this
is more complicated - because it feels as if something strange has hap-
pened to our understanding of time in the past few years. The revolt of
December 2008 was a spectacular crack in the path we used to tread. It
was as if everything until then culminated in a single point in time - and
that our reality has since hung mid-air; days trail endlessly and blend into
one: an entire society entering and then remaining in limbo.

But this limbo is not a pause, not at all. On the contrary; from the
moment when Alexis dropped to the ground, hit by a police bullet on
that Saturday night in Exarcheia, the rusty wheels of history have gone
into delirious spinning. Until a few years ago, most of us would have not
expected to ever witness the series of events that have since been unfold-
ing before our eyes: the 2008 revolt; the strike-back of the state and its
normality in its counter-insurrection operation that followed; the IMF/
EU/ECB agreement and the misery it entailed for so many, so fast.

I think back to the crazy euphoria of the summer of 2004, the last
and highest moment in which the capitalist spectacle exposed itself on
Greek territory. The spectacle created and enforced singularities before
sweeping them all under its veil: the complete alienation of capital. When
the spectacle was at its peak, any meaningful ties of solidarity - of com-
munity - hit an unprecedented low. It could only have happened this way.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE SQUARE

Then I fast-forward to the summer of 2011, shell-shock in the face
of IMF/EU/ECB agreements slowly giving way to all of their repercus-
sions. During this summer, Athens had an eerily unfamiliar vibrancy. A
few years earlier, summer was a lethargic time for the city: locals drift-
ing en-mass to the closest family house or to a cheap resort; tourists
replacing them, overflowing the Greek capital to trace its ancient past
before embarking to the nearest island. That was how it was some years
ago, a quiet time. But the current times are far from quiet. This summer,
thousands flocked to Athens’ main square, Syntagma, night after night,
their chants cutting through the breeze-less Athenian summer nights.
People who had never taken to the streets before met each other, held daily
popular assemblies at the square, discussed into the early hours, organ-
ised themselves on the ground and prepared for what quickly became a
full stand-off with the government: a square, a city, a people in spectacu-
lar turmoil.

I want to try to comprehend what the changes that brought these
people out in public mean, not in terms of how we do politics, but how
we make politics - how we create new understandings of what is politi-
cal, understandings that encompass more than we had conceived to be
the political sphere. To do away with the idea of representation, i.e. some
abstractly-understood power, to not allow allowing decisions to be made
far away from us with little or no space for us to influence their outcome.
Paul Mason's point on contemporary political actors having the ability
(essentially, the luxury) to “take a day off” was a great trigger. For me, this
point raises questions not so much about the luxury to choose when to
fight, but about the connection to and the relevance of each of these frag-
mented, limited struggles for our lives and the lives of others.

In the past years, there has been a dramatic change to the way that
we conceptualise these struggles. But before delving into these changes,
some background on the Greek context is necessary.

WHAT YOU CALL MODERN, WE CALL “NEVER BEEN”

A hopeful aspect of the Greek December of 2008, the square occupations
of 2011 and the thread of struggles linking the two, has been the relative
absence of a fixed political discourse. This, after all, is a country with
a fierce political history, a social setting that carries the scars of fierce
battles over quintessentially political matters: another, not-quite-invisible,

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

thread exists linking a civil war, a dictatorship and a succeeding demo-
cratic regime within and against which so many struggles have been
fought. Not quite the continuation of politics by other means; wars in the
past century in this Southern European land have been nearly as continu-
ous and constant as politics itself.

As explained by Giovanopoulos (2009) Greece, or rather, the Greek
economy, never fully underwent a complete industrialisation process.
Greece never saw the factory chimneys smoking over the mountains of its
mainland or its islands as were seen in the English North, the American
Rust Belt, or the Italian Northern Industrial Triangle. Industrialisation
started late and was interrupted early, thanks to the global shift of pro-
duction east of North America and Europe. And so, this never-completed
process saw Greek society make a leap from a pre-industrial to a post-
industrial one, largely omitting the in-between. Bruno Latour (1993)
famously said “we have never been modern” - perhaps a label Greeks
could use too.

In the political terrain, this has translated into the formation of
political agents that have not been explicitly nor firmly linked with their
workplace. This is not to say that there have been no significant work-
place struggles here - on the contrary! - but that social and political
struggles have followed quite a different trajectory. They have followed
a trajectory that understands each individual as less of a singular iden-
tity (a worker) and more as an augmentation of identities (a worker, a
family member, a member of a specific ethnic group, etc.). This might
explain why political consciousness seems to be running relatively high
around here, much boosted by this augmentation of identities, com-
bined with a rich history of political tension and struggle. And yet of
course, in the years of the seemingly endless euphoria, the reduction
of the consciousness of individuals to nothing but passive consumers
was near-absolute here too. In struggling for whatever right you were
struggling for, you would not only have been forgiven for taking a day
off, but even somewhat expected to do so and to cease being publicly
involved once that struggle was over. You would be expected to take all
days off any broader, political engagement. But after December 2008,
things could not stay the same. The state of emergency declared on
the side of state resonated on the side of those struggling - something
changed, for good.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE SQUARE

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE DAYS OF TAKING A DAY OFF?

One of the most formidable weapons that power has at its disposal in
order to enforce its rule is compartmentalisation. The British Empire
divided in order to rule over its subjects. But this division need not only
run between populations - the line can run pretty much through any-
where, especially between an individual’s different life functions. For
Giorgio Agamben (2000) this is a prerequisite for state sovereignty, as it
“can affirm itself only by separating in every context naked life from its
form” (2000: 11). But there is something deeply ironic here. The Greek
state (and in this it is not alone) is turning fast into what Agamben called
the “spectacular-democratic state”, “the final stage in the evolution of the
state-form - the ruinous stage toward which monarchies and republics,
tyrannies and democracies, racist regimes and progressive regimes are
all rushing” (2000: 86).

There are two distinct parallel processes taking place here. On the one
hand, the state is converging toward its absolute spectacle, this “ruinous
stage” where national borders begin to matter little, where ideologies of
the mainstream political spectrum are rendered increasingly irrelevant.
Of course Greek territory is a fine example: it no longer matters what
fraction of the unified parliamentary party is in power, and it is starting
to matter less whether parliament exists at all.

While this convergence is happening (this implosion of political ide-
ologies and modes of governance all coming into one), there is a simulta-
neous explosion - a forced attempt to rule through division, through the
absolute fragmentation of people's life, social, and political functions. In
other words, the idea that single-issue activism can be effective, or that
during struggle (or afterwards) it could be possible or even necessary to
take a day off; even worse, to have a day of struggle before going back to
normal (think of the dozens of anger-diffusing general strikes called by
the government-friendly trade unions in Greece)

But what happens when there is nowhere to take the day off to -
or when one struggle becomes inextricably connected to another, then
another, then another? Activists can pick up social struggles, take time
off and shift between them only for as long as social tension remains rel-
atively controllable, when the “wrongs” can be identified in a larger sea
of “rights”. There is a tipping point, however, where the causes to fight
for become a major issue in one’s own everyday reality, when there is

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

simply no escape, no way to go back home. Just like in Tahrir Square and
in Puerto del Sol, something funny happened to the people congregating
at Syntagma, day after day, night after night. What brought people out
there was anger. But what made them stay put, what empowered them to
break away from the convention of leaving once the ritualistic demonstra-
tion of their discontent had been showcased, was a different matter alto-
gether: in the gigantic assemblies, in the endless discussions lasting late
into the night, a new realisation started to sink in. A realisation that this
struggle was much bigger than any single demand or any mere attempt to
slightly re-figure the plexus of power. Against an all-out capitalist assault,
any meaningful response could only be as complete, as all-encompassing
as the assault itself. If there was to be any meaningful change, there would
be no more separation of struggles - every single struggle is my own. And
there would be no more time to take off - every moment is amoment of
struggle. Somewhere on their way back to the square, disgruntled citizens
and specialised activists would become revolutionary actors.

GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO JUST WON'T WAIT
Somebody asks: how do your days pass in Athens? I try to explain. They
protest: “but doesn't this become a struggle for its own sake? An endlessly
monotonic tempo? No matter what happens, your answer is the same:
fight. And then, when do you have the time to think, to produce, to love, to
live... ? Just being active is not being productive. Shouting slogans, always
the same slogans, will never inscribe anything firm into the ground.”
The idea of “hav/ing] a day off’ from protesting, occupying” (#13 in“20
Reasons’) is similar. On the one hand, an idea that the demise of organ-
ised working-class movements brings a type of revolutionary flexibility
that essentially works to our movement's advantage. But on the other
hand, this presupposes an understanding of occupying as an intermis-
sion between renting; of protesting as being separate from living. Giorgio
Agamben wrote the text quoted earlier in the chapter in his critique to
our understanding of ourselves as “citizens” who demand “rights” from
the state - a veil covering the absolute control of power, through the illu-
sion that it is possible to demand and to score victories before return-
ing to so-called normality. And yet, one of the most stunning things
about the struggles of the past years in the Greek territory is that people's
understanding of their enemy has shifted from a specific class or single

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE SQUARE

economic issues toward and understanding of their enemy as an all-
encompassing power. The slogans of the short-lived Syntagma Square

Occupation movement were too vague to be realisable without the radical

overthrowing of the existing order as a whole. We saw the firmness and

determination of the thousands who stayed put in the face of a police

onslaught on the square this summer - and then we saw them return-
ing to the square, assault after assault, before spreading the spirit of the

square occupation into neighbourhoods, workplaces and their everyday
life. As it is the capitalist onslaught that takes their days away, taking a

day off their struggles becomes a non-option. All facets of social resist-
ance have swiftly merged into one, and their days seem to blend into one.
These are extended moments of struggle to take back all of their days - to

take back their entire lives.

REFERENCES

Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000)

Christos Giovanopoulos, December and the City (unpublished article: 2009).

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press: 1993).

Antonis Vradis is a member of the anarchist collective Occupied London, a PhD can-
didate at the Department of Geography, LSE and the Alternatives editor of the journal
CITY. He is a regular contributor to the blog From the Greek Streets (http://www.occu-
piedlondon.org/blog) and co-editor, with Dimitris Dalakoglou, of Revolt and Crisis in
Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come (Oakland and Athens: AK
Press and Occupied London, 2011).

The revolution is my boyfriend

Tabitha Bast & Hannah Mcclure

archetypal protest leader in Bruce LaBruce’s 2004 film Raspberry

Reich. And it is her we think of, not a real woman like Asmaa
Mahfouz who “sparked the Arab Spring” or Commandante Ramona of
the Zapatistas: from the opening scenes of her haranguing her boyfriend
to fuck “out of the bedroom, onto the streets!”, her constant monotone
sloganeering about the sixth generation Red Army Faction, as ludicrous
as “cornflakes are counter-revolutionary’, to the scene where she orders
two men in her group into homosexuality for the revolution. Gudron is
indeed leader, organiser, facilitator and spokesperson. Undeniably, when
finally she declares the Revolution postponed it feels as if it is her place to
do so.

We laugh with both sympathy and recognition. This is a woman we
know from history, from films, from our own experiences. This is the full
time activist, the educated young woman who populates struggles now
and always. This is not a direct comparison to the woman we see today -
were not saying the two are the same. Gudron’s archetype aids us in an
inquiry into the way our relation to movement is born out of the produc-
tion of images, slogans and compositions - but also expressed through
the roles we play and how we relate to struggle. With acommitment and
passion like the most intense of romances, the revolution is indeed her
boyfriend - as it has been ours.

Weare familiar with this role, this passion and this intensity for rev-
olution. But what role, if any, did this female archetype of an educated

i T= revolution is my boyfriend!”, declares Gudron, the parodied

THE REVOLUTION IS MY BOYFRIEND

woman with a lust for change have in the recent wave of struggle? We are

aware that the explosive and viral character of the past year of struggle has

undoubtedly generated transformative images and political interactions.
Analysing the composition of the struggles we discover young, precari-
ous workers, intellectuals, school children and graduates taking to the

streets. This wave broke through more than geographical borders as town

after city after country after continent became infested with this passion.
Amongst the many visual and textual accounts littering both social and

professional media were striking images and words of the women within

these struggles. Photo after photo of women in Middle Eastern and North

African countries facing down lines of riot police or marching in hijabs

with fists raised in the air.* The second is of the prominence of women in

Europe protest movements, be it women on microphones in Plazas across

Spain, or of girls linking arms around a police van to protect it from the

rage of youth.

Differences in access to education and labour markets, different cul-
tural norms and gender roles will be reflected in different roles women
play in these distinct struggles. While recognising differences, contradic-
tions and complexities within the multitude of movements that formed
this year’s uprisings we are focusing on - broadly - the Arab Spring and
the (mostly) student dominated movement in the UK. Weare particularly
interested in - and have attempted to weave this narrative throughout
the chapter - the way the overt involvement of women links with some
of the other “reasons” Paul Mason refers to: the educated person with no
future, the increase in social media, etc. This interweaving of “reasons’ is
not because the question of the role of women has no weight on its own,
but rather, as can be seen by the striking headline of an opposition paper,
women stand with multiple guises:

She is the Muslim, the mother, the soldier, the protester, the jour-
nalist, the volunteer, the citizen.

With this we share an understanding that, unlike our Gudron, us real
women do not havea singular identity. Nor are our identities constructed
in isolation from those of the men we struggle against and alongside.
Our investigation into the statement draws us not to answers, but to
more questions. If the Revolution is My Boyfriend, then the Revolution
is Not Me. It is not just children that women take care of, but their lovers

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

too. This caring, supportive role may provide the backbone of a move-
ment, but it is not the same as taking part in leadership, where we still
see women excluded from leadership and spokesperson roles. This echoes
the role the majority of women play ina capitalist market, where women
take on the function of reproducing capital by being heavily involved in
the upkeep of labour-power, as primary care givers for both the family
and services industries, which both help to reproduce and keep capital
productive. Women as workers will of course play a key role in struggle,
this is because women form the core of informal and reproductive labour
which is under attack from the many neoliberal encroachments taking
place around the world.

These roles are paralleled in the crucial and indispensable respon-
sibilities women often have in protest movements today. For example
reports from the Arab Spring state that,

Women were involved in arranging food deliveries, blankets, the
stage and medical help... They treated the injured in the streets
and nursed them in their homes when they were too afraid to go
to hospital.”

However, we also recognise that within the social dynamics of the current
struggles there is the blurring of boundaries between leadership and the
backbone. What is exciting about this resurgence in movement is not
woman leading instead of the man, but rather the lack of key spokes-
persons, key media organiser and the disintegration of the need for the
“archetypal” protest leader as we know it. This is politics with a face of
many. We are witnessing a more collective and generalised rage against
the structures and relations of our everyday lives and the mistrust of those
in power. This has created an outburst in extra-parliamentary forms of
struggle going beyond the need for traditional political leadership. Again,
we do not wish to fetishize horizontal organisation, but we accept that it
provides a potential for change and flux in places it has not already and
ironically become institutionalised.

Our second question is around who? Who is this backbone woman?
Who is this female “archetypal protest leader?” Young, educated women
are numerous in the current wave of struggle but they have always been!
Firstly, women have always been the pin-ups for social movements. From
the masked and armed women in guerrilla armies across the Global South,

THE REVOLUTION IS MY BOYFRIEND

to the young female suicide bombers of Palestine, to the poster that turned
many of us onto politics as teens, that of Vivian during the Poll Tax Riots
going for a cop witha pole. These images of rebellious, and often beautiful
women, provide perfect propaganda for the Left. Far from the claims that
women have gone unnoticed, it seems these portraits of women in strug-
gle have dominated the imagery from movements even though women
have made up the minorities in street protests. If the Revolution is My
Boyfriend, we want to look good on his arm.

According to estimates, “at least 20%” of the crowds that thronged
Tahrir Square in the first week were women.’ But “at least 20%” seems
low when considering other struggles. For example, In the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the “Tamil Tigers”) women were active in up
to 40% of the group's suicide attacks and this level of participation is
common amongst Kurdish and Syrian terror groups.* Likewise, within
the UK, women have been heavily involved in the direct action move-
ments from the 1970s through to the 1990s, sometimes in dominant
numbers and often with more than “backbone’ roles. This is also true
of more recent direct action groups across the UK. If the numbers and
roles of women have meaning, perhaps we can detect some here: through
the UK environmental and anticapitalist movements, women taking the
role as facilitator, organiser and full time activist together with an explic-
itly feminist politics perhaps changes the structure of how we organise.
This can make those involved question privilege and male-dominated
spaces, and start implementing structures that allow for greater and
more inclusive involvement.

Ah, but let us return to the educated young woman! As explored pre-
viously, educated young women have often inhabited a role within move-
ments that is not definitive of woman in her different stages of life. Before
the relatively likely (though of course nation-, race- and class-dependent)
event of Motherhood, women’s position is entirely different both within
our political circles and in our most personal of relationships. Both edu-
cation and youth place women in a unique position amongst their less
privileged sisters, who are far more numerous than the educated young
woman who often represents womankind on the front-line.

The role for older women meanwhile often remains that of Mother,
even within our social movements. Mothers protecting their sons or
their husbands through demonstrations, anger and tears. This is not to

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

downgrade the role of Mother but rather to illustrate the limitations that
face women within social movements. Facing down traditional roles to
create new ways of being is somewhat more of a project than facing a line
of riot police.

As Sina Gabil vocalises,

People have been conditioned intellectually, psychologically and
religiously to discriminate against women. To change this will be
a lot harder than getting rid of Mubarak.’

Recognising the limitations women face and the role youth, education

and class play within our social movements, we would also like to ask
the question, so what? If women are numerous in social movements is

this a process of struggle creating “gender equality”, new forms of relat-
ing outside the confines of token state policies changing? Women’s inter-
ests within social movements are different, and often contradictory. For
example, the middle-class women within the Arab Spring have been

focusing their political energies on issues of political representation and

on laws affecting women’s equality. The working-class women are typi-
cally more concerned with wages and workers rights.° There are shared

struggles against violence and for voice, but the expression and demand

may conflict within women’s class interests. We are again wryly sympa-
thetic to Gudron when she declares: “All roles alienate equally but some

are more despicable than others.”

It is imperative to analyse exactly what the function of women is
within social movements. Using traditional limitations and stereotypes
of women’s role has been credited with inspiring much of the Arab Spring
when women appealed for their menfolk to take to the streets. We urge
caution with how triumphantly we should see these apparent subver-
sions. Working within the constant dynamic of power while we subvert
the meanings imposed upon us to rise up, the cooption of women’s role
as peacemakers, negotiators and carers will be continually used against
the potential of the movement.

It is interesting to reflect on that image of the girls surrounding a
police van that had journalists panting during the student uprisings in the
UK. What were those girls doing? And what were the media doing who
paid homage to the women as the correct and upstanding representation
of manageable protest? Zoe Williams, the much-exalted demonstrator

THE REVOLUTION IS MY BOYFRIEND

who protected property from rioters - and not just any old property but
the police van, a symbol of state power - became the hero of the Daily Mail
and its like, which noted with, one imagines, little critique:

The teenager, a first-year History of Art student at the Courtauld
Institute of Art, previously attended the £12,500-a-year Colfe’s
School in south-east London where she left with four A grades at
A-level.”

She seems perfect for the role of educated, young woman who exemplifies
the social movements, rather than her streetwise working-class counter-
parts who were kicking in the windows.

What then can we conclude? Our truthful answer is: nothing. We can
only ask more questions and that questioning must not end. To believe
in conclusions is to believe in utopias. We watch and act keenly though,
to see if our voices go beyond the need for political representation and an
equality based on neoliberal market-based rights. We suggest that women
as workers - as students, as mothers - as our many different productive
roles we claim, and use to relate to one another, need to question how we
relate to one another and recognise how we, in our daily lives and strug-
gle, both challenge and confirm the status quo. We can challenge by
recognising our role as reproducers and workers, as part of a wider col-
lectivity and struggle, but can confirm by slipping into identity politics,
biological determinism and fear. Underlying these questions regarding
limitations, equality, roles and struggle, the Madrid-based Precarias a la
Deriva collective argues that,

capital fragments the social in order to extract value, we join
together in order to elevate it and displace it toward other places. *

Women are indeed numerous and are dynamic, exciting and crucial
parts of the recent uprisings spanning across the globe - but as workers,
as women, as revolutionaries, we need to question and eradicate a value
system based on competition and economic productivity so that collec-
tively we can figure out and fight for what we truly desire.

Without participating in struggle, women’s lives will not be changed.
But the way we participate and the way we represent our participation in
these struggles is constantly in tension between changing and colluding
with dominant ideologies . With rebel joy we take to the streets but it is

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

as much in the transformation of the occupiers as the occupation that we

rejoice. We have faith in the power of action, but only when coupled with

critical thought. Indeed, this is one marriage we wish to uphold. It is not

enough to be the girlfriend of the Revolution. If this is all we get, we sin-
cerely declare the Revolution Postponed.

NOTES

http://muftah.org/? p=928 , Dotsen - Renta, L, “Revolutionary Women: Mirroring
Latin America & The Arab World”
http://www. guardian.co. uk/world/2011/apr/22/women-arab-spring , Rice et al,

“Women have emerged as key players in the Arab spring”

http: //www.thenation.com/article/160179/arab-spring-women , Cole, Juan and
Shahin “An Arab Spring for Women”

Dugdale-Pointon, TDP., Suicide Attacks - Terrorist, http://www. historyofwar.org/
articles/weapons suicide. html.

http://www. worldcrunch.com/arab-spring-female-factor/2999, I, Mandraud, “Arab
Spring: The Female Factor”

http: //www.thenation.com/article/160179/arab-spring-women , Cole, Juan and
Shahin “An Arab Spring for Women”

http://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1332811/TUITION-FEES-PROTEST-
Students-streets-girls-leading-charge. html#ixzziSjcJ8J4m , R, Camber et al,

“Tuition Fees Protest: Britain's Students Take to the streets again - this time women

are leading the charge.”
http: /zinelibrary.info/files/A%20 Very %20Careful%2oStrike.pdf, The Precarias a
la Deriva, “The Silent Strike”

Do the entrepreneuriat dream
of electric sheep?
Why contemporary activists talk about power

Andre Pusey & Bertie Russell

tis perhaps an exaggeration to suggest, as Paul Mason has, that those
| ee either Tahrir or Parliament square are well versed in their

Hardt & Negri, much less their Deleuze, Guattari or Foucault. Yet it
doesn't take a bookworm to realise that the forms of struggle witnessed
over the past six months surpass any simplistic “us and them” binary, and
that a more nuanced understanding of power is required if we are to come
to terms with the battles we are fighting.

The authors Mason refers to are, in our opinion, indispensable in
helping us understand the shifting arrangements of power and its rela-
tion to the changing forms of capitalist accumulation. Things seem sig-
nificantly different now for a variety of reasons, with recent uprisings in
Tunisia, Egypt and Libya among others, as well as an upsurge in struggle
in the UK and across Europe - things seem to have started to move.

Despite claims to novelty or “newness’, to a greater or lesser extent,
all of the authors Mason mentions belong to the Marxist tradition, albeit
ina bastard form. Marx’s “old mole” - the movement which abolishes the
present state of things - has not gone away, but has just been lying low,
experimenting with new concepts, drawing from the commonwealth
of different intellectual traditions and struggles. Far from substituting a
critique of “class” with “power” per se, as Paul Mason has suggested, they
instead suggest that different forms of class struggle are needed - forms
that spill beyond the factory walls and political parties to take account
of the diffuse methods by which capital “accumulates our souls” in con-
temporary society. In this chapter we wish to outline some of the ways

75)

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

we think capital and class composition have been transformed. They are
tentative ideas and suggestions, to be developed further.
1. The late 1960s and 1970s saw the beginning of a substantial shift in
the technical composition of class. In what is commonly referred to as
the shift from “Fordist” to “post-Fordist” production, what began to be
abandoned was the organising of production en masse, where thousands
of workers were mapped out on factory floors by a handful of “foremen”
that operated as mini-dictators. These mini-dictators commanded eve-
rything within their factory-kingdoms; where workers stood, how long
they stood there for, what their hands did, how fast their hands moved,
and so on. The social composition of this Fordist production model hence
appeared to imitate a form of sovereign power, which is to say, the foreman
appeared to directly organise and direct the space, time and bodies that
fell under their command.
2. The shift froma Fordist to a post-Fordist organisation of production
did not so much abandon these forms of disciplinary workplaces that
relied on the foreman-dictator, rather they displaced their prominence.
Not only were these actual Fordist sites of production shifted geographi-
cally to the global South and East, but this form of organising produc-
tion was displaced by new regimes of production based on novel forms of
control. In other words, new forms of organising the process of produc-
tion emerged in certain “developed” areas of the world that increasingly
did not rely on the foreman-dictator to enforce our compliance, but rather
the emergence of the manager-magician.
3. Unlike the foreman-dictator, the manager doesn‘ directly discipline
the worker through informing what tasks must be undertaken, how they
are to be performed, and in which order they must be performed. The fore-
man-dictator operates using mechanical or analog forms of power, where
a worker is considered to be an inert lump of flesh and bones that must be
directly animated if they are to perform any “useful” task. Under the aus-
pices of the manager, the workers are interpreted as autonomous subjects
that are permanently electrified. The “magic” of the manager is that she
can make things happen without apparently forcing anything directly.
So where the foreman-dictator had to use force and overt coercion, the
manager uses more subtle forms of power, getting things to move as if by
“magic”. Given that these electrified-workers are already active, conscious,
living beings, the task of the manager-magician is not to force them to

DO THE ENTREPRENEURIAT DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

move like a wooden puppet, but to create the “fields of sense” within which
these electrified-workers then operate of their own accord. The electrified-
worker doesn't perform a task because a foreman dictates what to do; she
performs multiple tasks without specific instruction, having been put on
a general trajectory by the manager-magician. We are no longer in motion
because we are being directly animated by the foreman-dictator; we are
in motion because it “makes sense’ to perform certain tasks according to
the logic set out by our managers. We are no longer being shoved with a
wooden stick but animated within digital fields of sense, at times accom-
panied by jolts from electric shocks, although it is increasingly difficult
to identify their origin.
4. The electrified-worker, rather than an inert vegetal mass put into
motion by the foreman-dictator, now appears as a self-motivated and
dynamic ‘entrepreneur’. The worker is no longer primarily valued accord-
ing to the extent to which she can be efficiently disciplined and have time
extracted from her. Instead, the valued worker is one who has learned how
to “use her initiative”, who is capable of “thinking outside the box”, and
who can constantly invest (without dictation) in her own capacity to be
a flexible, efficient, and dynamic entrepreneur. The old axiom “socialism
equals soviets plus electricity” turns out to be the tagline for the Facebook
generation.
5. This new entrepreneuriat operates increasingly without any punch-
card to register when they are or are not working; this form of measure-
ment and method of delineating work and play belongs to the Fordist organ-
isation of production. As the development of the social factory expanded
the field of capitalist production and value extraction across society, time
itself became saturated by capital. The entrepreneuriat is never on or off,
but permanently electrified and permanently in motion. As the Italian
“autonomous” Marxist Franco Bifo Beradi has suggested, “Capital no longer
recruits people, it buys packets of time [...] de-personalised time is now the
real agent of the process of valorisation, and de-personalised time has no
rights”. In this sense, we find that we are living ina state of precarity, where
despite the fact we find ourselves permanently investing in ourselves, we
increasingly work on fixed-term contracts or without a contract altogether.
6. Rather than appearing as an homogenous group to be disciplined by
the foreman-dictator, the individuals of the entrepreneuriat are self-moti-
vated to constantly assess, measure, and invest in themselves, with the

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

purpose of becoming more “dynamic” individuals. Rather than begrudg-
ingly undertaking “industrial training” at the behest of the foreman-dic-
tator, a state of permanent education is demanded, actively pursued and

increasingly funded by the entrepreneuriat itself. The entrepreneuriat

desires constant investment in Me Inc. to raise their personal stock of
human capital, ensuring that it can perform better in the market compe-
tition between workers.

7. Asthe entrepreneuriat, we increasingly interpret our co-workers

not as comrades united in mutual exploitation under the dictates of the

foreman-dictator, but as “healthy” competitors. We don't stand united

as a class in the face of capital, we run against each other in the name of
self-improvement. There exists only a modicum of solidarity with fellow
co-workers. Of course we care for them and share our coffee breaks, but

we are ultimately aware that we are in competition with them. Who can

sell the most Levi 501s in the next four hours? Who can secure the longest

phone contract? Who can publish the most articles, or guarantee the

return custom? The investment in Me Inc. is no longer just in customer
service training or getting a degree, but in whitening your teeth, enlarg-
ing your breasts and getting hair follicles implanted/removed. The body
itself has become an investment opportunity.

8. The most successful corporations are harnessing competition and

putting it to work, so that electrified workers compete against each other
in the name of improving the health of their collective body. We are put to

work against each other and we don‘ even realise it - instead we buy into

a myth that this competition is for the “collective good”, and that those

that are not-up-to-scratch will have to be amputated for the good of the

collective. We are close to the wildest of perversions where the amputated

entrepreneuriat supports and understands its own redundancy - “for the

good of the body”.

g. Ifthe post-Fordist transition saw a move from the foreman-dictator
to the manager-magician, we have increasingly seen the latter transform

into our comrades, offering us “pastoral care” and complimentary Me Inc.
investment guidance to “help” us deal with the anxiety of full-spectral-
competition. We are increasingly operating as self-managed autono-
mous entities, investing our own temporal, psychological and financial

resources into our own training. The foreman-dictator is increasingly
becoming superfluous; his analog, mechanical techniques are no longer

DO THE ENTREPRENEURIAT DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

effective, as there is no longer an inert vegetal mass that requires directing.
The good “manager” is now more of a carer and a “friend”, someone who
helps you “fulfil your potential” in your competitive endeavour against
others. Perhaps the most developed example of this exists within the uni-
versity system, where managers are increasingly cast as “pastoral” carers,
whilst weekly emails offer you “opportunities” to enhance your individual
ability to engage with industry, deliver presentations effectively, write
successful grant bids or increase your “networking” skills.

10. The manager-magician has ultimately become the new therapist,
attempting to help the worker constantly adjust to a world that is moving
increasingly too fast to comprehend. This form of therapy can be under-
stood as the psycho-social restructuring of our fields of sense in the inter-
ests of capital. The way we understand ourselves and those around us, the
way we interpret and act upon the world, is constantly being refined to
ensure our emotional compatibility with capital - therapy in the name
of “normalising” ourselves, or to overcome the anxiety, panic and depres-
sion that results from operating in a world in which we don't fit.

We need to abandon forms of therapy (and forms of thought) that
suggest that it is us that is the problem, and instead construct militant
therapeutic practices that enable us to collectively recognise and break
with those “fields of sense” that limit our lives and capacities. The therapy
we need to engage in is based on collective action and analysis, so that we
can learn to create our own - common - “fields of sense”.

To be explicit: we are not saying that the entirety of the class is now
organised this way. Rather, we are drawing attention to the increasing
prevalence of the new “social technologies” through which we are governed
(and govern) in the interests of capital. Nonetheless, it is clear that as these
technologies proliferate, the forms of resistance that assume power still
operate primarily according to the logic of foreman-dictators disciplining
our bodies, will be increasingly ineffective. Capital began to abandon such
forms of sovereign direction when we found ways to effectively resist it in
the 1960s and 1970s. One only has to look at the impotence of recent strike
actions and traditional trade unions to see that revolutionary techniques
can no longer be found in any “overthrowing of the boss”. Instead, we must,
out of necessity, forge techniques of collective resistance that operate not
against someone or something “out there”, but against ourselves - against
the entrepreneuriat and the digital value systems that organise our desires.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

This is a process of exodus, via the exorcism of generalised self-invest-
ment in ourselves! This exodus is not a territorial flight, but a desertion
of the role and values developed as the entrepreneuriat. Of course, the
working class has always been a diabolical category; the purpose has always
been to abolish our role as workers, defined as such by our subsumption
under capitalist command.

Some in the anti-cuts movement see the increased social antago-
nisms developing within society, anger over the rich evading tax, cuts to
social services and increasing fees, and wish to bring back to central stage
a certain preordained version of an alternative - an orthodox Marxist-
Leninist crystal ball that can inform us that “one last push’ will abolish the
present and give birth to a Socialist future. However, we don't subscribe to
this idealist conception of how history moves - nobody is willing to give
away the ability to write their own futures anymore. The problem we face,
however, is that we don't yet know how to be “in organisation” in a way that
will precisely allow us to move in, against and beyond capitalism. What
appears almost certain is that this will necessitate a co-ordinated psycho-
social deprogramming - a sort of collective social therapeutic process to
extricate ourselves from the new forms of control that capital developed
whilst we were still dreaming of cutting off the king’s head.

Radicalising the armed forces

Federico Campagna

nthe beginning, it was the navy. On the morning of October 30", 1918,
|: sailors of the battleship Kiel mutinied, forcing their commander

to flee under cover of disguise. In the following days, more and more
German battleships were taken over by their sailors, who, together with
workers from the cities, created councils for direct democratic decision-
making. The unrest quickly moved to factory workers and to the rest of
the army, to the point that, on November g'", 1918, the socialist leader
Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the onset of revolution, an action which
finally led to the end of the war and of the Kaiser.

Today, in the winter of 2011, which reminds some of the “spring of
nations’ of 1848, it is once again the army that plays a crucial role in the
success of popular revolts across North Africa. In Tunisia and Egypt, mass
demonstrations found solidarity in large sectors of the military, which
did not oppose the popular insurgency and even helped to bring down
the regime. In Libya, the initial armed confrontation against mercenary
troops hired by Gaddafi was made possible by the defection of the police
and their active and military support of the protest movement.

The American theorist and anarchist Noam Chomsky once said that
engaging in armed confrontation with the State is a suicide attempt, as “if
you come with a rifle, they will come back witha tank, if you come with a
tank, they will come back witha fighter jet”. Ata first consideration, such
a statement seems to be irrefutable. The State, in most parts of the world,
does not only have the monopoly on the use of “legitimate” violence, but
also has exclusive access to all possible means of a military confrontation

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

with external or internal enemies. However, it is indeed in Chomsky’s
sentence that is hidden the key of a possible breakthrough. Specifically
in the word “they”. Who are “they”? It might seem that “they” refers to
the State and its powers. Nonetheless, this is not an accurate interpreta-
tion. “They” are the army and the police, that is, the effective, practical
holders of all the means of military action. In fact, Chomsky’s sentence
holds a deep truth, one that may escape his initial intentions: it is “them”
who have the power to decide on the result of any imaginable social unrest.
Seen with the eyes of the democratic West, and in particular with
those of people on the left, the army and the police seem to belong to a
dimension of existence that has very little to share with that of the civil pop-
ulation. After the end of mandatory conscription in most European coun-
tries, the military has increasingly become a highly specialised, elite force
that resembles more the armies of private contractors than the popular
armies of the past. Like the caste of warriors of some ancient civilisations,
most armed forces of the West have lost any real contact with the lives and
desires of those populations that they supposed to defend. Furthermore,
just like in those castes, the level of democracy internal to the armed forces
has now reached the all-time-low of a tight hierarchical organisation.
Today, after decades of devoted pacifism, it is difficult for most of
the European left to remember the positive role that large sectors of the
army played in several moments of revolutionary struggle. Also, and
more strangely, to remember the experiences of radical politics that often
took place within old-style, conscripted armies. We could mention, for
example, the Italian groups Proletari in Divisa (Proletarians in Uniform)
in the 1960s and the 1970s. During those years, Italian society witnessed
an amazing level of social tension, with the radicalisation of the class con-
flict and the self-mobilisation of large sectors of the population belonging
to far-left organisations. The young people entering the army at that time
brought into the barracks that same revolutionary spirit that was shaking
other disciplinary institutions such as factories, prisons and schools. The
aim of Proletari in Divisa was that of challenging the hierarchical structure
of the army, as well as its obedience to the interests of the government and
of the ruling class, and that of supporting and connecting with the social
struggles happening all over the country. Despite the clear illegality of it,
on several occasions thousands of radical soldiers marched in their uni-
forms, their faces covered by red scarves, alongside workers and students.

RADICALISING THE ARMED FORCES

Soldiers also called for strikes inside the barracks in solidarity with strikes
happening in the factories, started their own democratic councils and even
issued their own publications.

Of course, this seems to be a universe away from today’s experience
of what British nationalists call “our boys” deployed as occupation troops
in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, it might be the case that such a dra-
matic change in the role and the potential of the army for progressive,
revolutionary social change has to be blamed in part on the a priori paci-
fism of most sectors of the left. Apart from the occasional, often shallow,
reminder that “policemen are the sons of workers”, there have been vir-
tually no attempts in recent years to explore the possibility of transform-
ing the armed forces from an element of governmental repression and
subjugation to one of popular liberation.

Today, as much as in the past, most people in the army and in the
police come from working-class and underprivileged backgrounds. In
some cases, such as that of the UK, they lack of the most basic rights as
workers. Since the Police Act of 1919, for example, British policemen and
women have been denied the right to strike and even the right to join trade
unions, which have been substituted by a government-run organisation,
the Police Federation of England and Wales. Moreover, in recent years
the British government has significantly eroded the right to conscientious
objection by police officers - which is guaranteed by a warrant from the
Crown that allows each officer to act as an individual at their own discre-
tion (therefore, they cannot be ordered to arrest someone if they believe
that not to be the right course of action) - by employing non-warranted
Police Community Support Officers.

However, this is not enough to stop the armed forces from becom-
ing arguably the strongest accomplices of State and corporate domina-
tion over national and foreign populations. To say it in Marxist terms,
the fact that most of the armed forces are in “in themselves” part of the
proletariat, does not imply that they are part of the proletariat as a revo-
lutionary class “for itself”. Examples such as that of Proletariin Divisa and
of countless other experiences before that, though, show that this is not
an impossible shift to make.

It is in the best interest of the radical social movements that are now
springing up everywhere across Europe to imagine how this could happen.
Maybe, instead of aiming at engaging in often pointless confrontations

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

with the police, movement participants could make an effort to meet

policemen and soldiers out of their working hours and engage in friendly,
informal, subtle moments of direct propaganda. They could try and under-
stand what are the tensions and injustices internal to the armed forces and

support the privates in their claims for a decent and equal treatment. They

could invite them to political meetings, introduce them to their friends

and turn institutional enemies into personal friends.

This kind of strategy could achieve a number of important results.
First of all, it would give these workers, employed in an authoritarian
structure, the possibility to reclaim their basic rights, both as workers
and as human beings, and to perceive themselves as less separated from
the civilian members of the community they live in. As French psycho-
analyst Jacques Lacan pointed out, the essence of perversion is the feeling
of irresponsibility for one’s own actions. In this sense, the politicisation
of workers in the armed forces, who are institutionally encouraged to
embrace perversion in return for immunity, and their integration within
the civilian community would discourage this psychotic separation, which
is at the basis of most police abuses.

Secondly, it would bea gracious twist of irony, as it would mirror the
common police practice of infiltrating radical political groups. Despite
all possible effort to politicise soldiers and police officers, the very struc-
ture of the armed forces will always be deeply embedded within a wider
system of economic and social power, privileges and inequalities, of which
they are the designated guardians. Thus, the institutions that compose
the armed forces are still to be considered and treated as natural enemies.
In this sense, it would be advisable for radical movements to create their
own system of intelligence and their networks of infiltrators within the
armed forces, in order to gather information and possibly to prevent their
strategies of repression.

And finally, but most important, there is no more effective way to
disarm a person than to disarm his or her brain. And, which is maybe
more important, there is no better way to gain access to military strength,
if necessary, than to gain access to the brains that control it.

Federico Campagna, born in 1984, is an Italian writer and activist, based in London. He
writes on radical politics and political philosophy, with special attention to anarchism.

He is a member of the online multilingual platform Through Europe (http: //th-rough.
eu). He is a regular contributor to the Italian magazines Loop and Alfabetaz.

Some complications
..and their political economy

Emma Dowling

little men from elite society
telling us to build a big society
take the pin-striped suits and show them the door
then cut the rich, not the poor.
— Captain Ska

hat of the responses by the state and capital to the current cir-

culation of struggles? Whither these most recent movements

of movement? These seem to be the questions on Paul Mason’s
mind as he offers us “some complications” to his twenty theses - theses
he qualifies are generalisations that require further investigation, reflec-
tion and refinement to which the collection of essays in this volume are
a contribution. In these caveats, he reminds us of the methods the state
has available to it to co-opt or repress and therefore avert struggles for
social transformation. Whether this is through infiltration or through
a mimicry that aims at subverting and thus weakening movements, or
whether this is through outright repression and scare tactics: cyber-attacks
and restrictions to internet access, pre-emptive surveillance and arrests,
as well as violence against the disobedient bodies that continue to occupy
streets and squares. Mason also reminds us not to fetishise forms of organ-
isation and communication as ends in and of themselves. Networked,
virtual forms of communication and organisation do not “belong” to resist-
ance or to progressive movements; the state and capital are as immersed
in the current networked forms of communication and organisation as

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

muchas social networks and virtual communications have been conduits
for the most recent uprisings; the question is one of power.

Mason ends on what he observes as the persistence of a disconnect
between people and governments: the state’s inability to legitimise the poli-
tics of austerity. That is, the massive transferral of wealth from labour to
capital, ever-more precarisation and the further subsumption of society
under capital’s enclosure and exploitation are processes that not only
require positively couched discourses of legitimacy, necessity and common
interest to engender consent, but are processes that demand of the state the
enforcement of obedience through control, as well as the repression and
criminalisation of dissent. In the UK, the Government is currently trying
to deal with three facets of crisis. Firstly, there is the need to legitimise the
cuts in response to protests that have reached deep into the social fabric.
Secondly, there is the need to create the conditions for the reproduction of
labour power in the face of an intensified crisis of social reproduction pre-
cipitated upon the restructurings that have been unleashed. Thirdly - and
this is crucial - there is a need to find drivers of economic growth. During
the crisis of the 1980s under Thatcher, the Conservative mantra was that
there was no such thing as society. This time around, the Tories are propa-
gating at least what on the surface of it seems to be the opposite: an intense
belief in the importance of the social and the need to harness its potential.

The buzzword of the Conservative Party’s 2010 election campaign
and since then, of the Coalition Government’s austerity measures, has
been the “Big Society”. Encapsulated in the Big Society is the intention of
drastically cutting government funding to public services and to charities,
voluntary organisations and social enterprises whilst - using discourses
of “empowerment” and devolution - encouraging a culture of community
engagement and social activism as investment opportunities for corpora-
tions and banks. As Paul Mason observes, in the corridors of Westminster
bigging up society is serious business. The Big Society is intended to alle-
viate the three main headaches the UK Government has, namely legiti-
mation, social reproduction and economic growth. Let's look at each of
these in turn.

LEGITIMATION
On the level of legitimation, the Coalition Government and Big Society
ideologues such as Nat Wei, Phillip Blond, Jesse Norman or venture

SOME COMPLICATIONS ...AND THEIR POLITICAL ECONOMY

capitalist Sir Ronald Cohen have not yet been very successful. The “Big
Society” is emblematic of the disconnect that Paul Mason highlights: for
the Government the “Big Society” is the solution, yet it seems that for
everyone else, the Big Society is ridiculed as a big joke. Political com-
mentator Polly Toynbee has branded the Big Society a “big lie’, trade
union leaders have called it a “smokescreen for the cuts” and the direct
action network UK Uncut have organised “Big Society bail-ins” against
the UK Government's bail-outs, occupying banks to protest the cuts
to welfare state. The voluntary sector is also not happy: here the argu-
ment prevails that it is precisely the cuts that will stall not promote a
Big Society, with Labour Party leader Ed Milliband fuelling this for his
party’s own ends.

In any society that is premised upon the privileged appropriation
of socially produced wealth - aka capitalism - the problem for the state
acting in the interests of the privileged - aka capital - is how to justify the
inequitable distribution of the social surplus. The problem only intensi-
fies with austerity in which these transfers of wealth in the direction of
the rich become much more apparent. But, legitimation is not just about
what politicians say in their speeches and press releases, and our task is
not simply to unearth the true ongoings behind their “lies”. Legitimation
is also about the material concessions that the privileged are forced to
make depending upon the power relations that exist in society. Often,
power relations are such that no or very few concessions have to made,
and many times politicians are not necessarily lying. The Big Society is an
example of this. It’s important to recognise that the Big Society is not just
vacuous propaganda on the level of discourse dreamt up by Conservative
Party spin doctors and fellow travellers. What matters - literally in that
it has materiality - is that the Big Society is the attempt to use the state
to reorganise society for its further neoliberalisation. The only lie that
is being espoused is that these restructurings are equally in everyone's
interest. Whilst vociferously rejecting any claims that “we are all in this
together’, dissing the Big Society and what stands behind its rhetoric is
certainly appropriate, we shrug the Big Society off with a suppressed laugh
at our peril. The cuts do not undermine the Big Society, the cuts are the
Big Society and we are not just being goaded into its affective dimensions,
we are being forced into it by the political and economic restructurings
that are taking place.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

CRISIS OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

In order to maintain a degree of social cohesion, the state has to legitimise

the cuts and the imposition of the commodity form on ever-more areas of
social life. However, to maintain at least a minimum level of stability for
capital accumulation, the state also has to address the worsening crisis of
social reproduction and the need to reproduce labour power to maintain

the system of capital accumulation, because labour is the key source of
value for capital. We need not view the reproduction of our labour power
as simply consumption - going to the shops and buying what we need and

want (and can afford). Nor is it simply the ability to access public services

such as health care or education. The reproduction of labour power also

involves huge amounts of both waged and unwaged work, work that we

do. For capital, the source of social surplus is unwaged labour, therefore,
as feminists have pointed out with the example of housework, if it is

made invisible and not counted as work, it can be more easily controlled

and manipulated and it does not have to be paid for. Reproductive labour
is often made invisible as labour, precisely in order for it be valorised by
capital without capital having to afford the cost of this labour, or in order
to keep the cost of this labour as low as possible. The Big Society then is

about increasing that huge amount of work that we do in its unwaged

form, i.e. for free. Using the affectively enticing discourses of mutual-
ism, cooperation, collectivity and empowerment, the state off-loads the

cost of the crisis directly onto us all. As we are already all well aware, the

banks have and continue to be bailed out and public services cut such that

they are no longer available for us to access (unless we pay for them indi-
vidually at the point of delivery). But, perhaps even more poignantly, by
appealing to notions of community - i.e. to all of us to provide services

in the name of caring directly for one another as opposed to asking the

state to do so - the Government is drastically reducing the social wage and

making us work more for less and in many cases, for free. The rhetoric of
care, compassion and community is an attempt to make work not appear
as work so that it does not have to be negotiated as such and remunerated.
Thus, the concern with social cohesion is not only a concern with averting
protest and resistance, it is also a concern with the crisis of social repro-
duction that is being dealt with by off-loading the cost of the reproduction

of labour power - and of life - directly on to the individual worker and

away from the state (and capital). The bind that we find ourselves in is

SOME COMPLICATIONS ...AND THEIR POLITICAL ECONOMY

that the work of reproducing our livelihoods is work that has to be done
and work that we care about doing - childcare or eldercare being two of
the most obvious examples - it is not work that can easily be refused or
stopped via a strike.

HARNESSING SOCIAL ENERGIES FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH
In the same way that the state’s response to demands for wages for house-
work by feminists in the 1970s was to enable the capitalist marketisation
of the household, the Big Society is not just spitting us all out from the
state and letting us get on with self- organising our lives and self-managing
the common (aside from the obvious question of who is going to have the
time, energy and resources to do even more work without being paid for it).
Instead, what is happening is that the neoliberal project that New Labour
already embarked on with its support for the development of the social
enterprise, Public-Private Partnerships and Private Finance Initiatives,
is undergoing a shock doctrine style speed up. Here, the Conservative
ideological obsession with the lean state meets the need to find drivers
for economic growth - capital's solution to the crisis. The Big Society in
this respect is the desire to harness the energies of the social to create new
markets for financial investment and capitalist valorisation.
The easiest and quickest way to understand this is to follow the money.
The Big Society of course cannot rely on compassionate free labour alone,
it needs resources. The resources will be provided primarily by the Big
Society Bank, funded by four of the major banks (Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC
and RBS). In order for investment to make good business sense for a bank,
it needs to receive returns on its investment. A few of the questions that as
yet remain unanswered are, what interest rates will the banks charge for
the loans and investments they make? To what extent will shareholders be
involved in decision-making? It is not difficult to envisage that the logic of
investment banking - even when itis social investment banking - will be
to pressure Big Society projects to make organisational decisions that make
“good business sense’, i.e. that provide financial returns on investment.
Furthermore, what are the criteria with which the state assesses and gives
out contracts for service provision by organisations competing for contracts
and for money? Who will govern the Big Society, will it be venture capi-
talists or will it be us? And will it deliver on its ideological promise of all-
round happiness? The answer is to be found in the rhetoric of the question.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

The social investment market is supposed to grow. Rendering social
energies productive for capital goes hand in hand with the deregulation
of existing markets (such as education, health and housing) to pave the
way for a truly corporate Britain in which everyone is enmeshed. The
ethical appeals that are so central to the ideology of the Big Society are
interestingly spun as being commensurate not only with care, love and
compassion as opposed to greed, individualism and selfishness, but also
with forms of social organisation that were previously associated with
the Left, such as employee-ownership, mutuals and cooperatives. These
forms are being made compatible with the values and language of compe-
tition and entrepreneurism. The disconnect in the values and language of
the state and those of young people that Paul Mason identifies is one that
the Big Society is supposed to close by positing false dichotomies of “good”
versus “bad” human behaviour, of virtues versus vices, of caring versus
being selfish, of communities versus individuals - coming down firmly
on the side of the former in each case. Their vision is a kind of depoliti-
cised ethical technocracy run by virtuous experts with the help of all of
us. What is the political economy of the complications Paul Mason leaves
us with at the end of his article? It is our solidarity and creativity in and
against the Big Society, the antagonism of our livelihoods versus capital’s
incessant search for valorisation, and the role of the state in the struggle
to impose those conditions that make that valorisation possible.

APPENDIX Twenty reasons why
it's kicking off everywhere

eve had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering;

W: Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared.

In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for

a “Second Republic”; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on

the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece strik-

ing and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had
riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.

What’s going on? What's the wider social dynamic?

My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a
discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing
them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with aca-
demics who study this and also the participants themselves.

At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; western-
ised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has
now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting “they use twitter” is
missing the point of what they use it for.

In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different
situation, here’s 20 things I have spotted:

1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no

future

2. _...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog

so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from par-
liamentary democracy to tyranny.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes
flammable.
4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism,
Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all
forms are rejected.
5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty
years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the
“archetypal” protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an
educated young woman.
6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy:
it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quin-
tessential experience of the 20" century - was the killing of dissent within
movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.
7. Memes: “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols
or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through
writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters
of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they
self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.” (Wikipedia) -
so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly “market tested” and
either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed
no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the inter-
net this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement
but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.
8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more pow-
erful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to
form. So if you “follow” somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter,
as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or
a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on
Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early
20" century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train car-
riages across borders just to make links like these.
g. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to univer-
sity-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education
will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal
indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt
so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal
retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer

TWENTY REASONS WHY IT'S KICKING OFF EVERYWHERE

than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch;
the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individu-
als reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.
10. This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive
societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid eco-
nomic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people
fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.
11. To amplify: I can’t find the quote but one of the historians of the
French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people
but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disap-
point the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are
sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in
their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.
12. The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relation-
ship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised
workforce. The world looks more like 19 century Paris - heavy predom-
ination of the “progressive” intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-
dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets then, raves now); huge
social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories cel-
ebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture
and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they
find themselves a “stage army” to be marched on and off the scene of
history.
13. This leads toa loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement:
they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from.
They can “have a day off” from protesting, occupying: whereas twith he
old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was
determined and they couldnt retreat once things started. You couldn't
“have a day off” from the miners strike if you lived in a pit village.
14. In addition toa day off, you can “mix and match’: I have met people
who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to
Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy;
then they're writing a book about something completely different. I was
astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation
blogging from Tahrir Square this week.
15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just
on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is

available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it’s not pre-
digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example

there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I

studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s.
Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying

to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be

more complex because people have an instant reference source for the

undisputed premises of arguments. It’s as if physics has been replaced by
quantum physics, but in every discipline.

16. There is no Cold War, andthe War on Terror is not as effective as the

Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to bea

worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of
control, post Mubarak - asin all the colour revolutons - the dire warnings

of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a “meme” that has not

taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme

starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I

am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover
in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the

media behind Mubarak.

17. Itis - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possi-
ble to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years

in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the

oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/
Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth online and

through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here - it is for
example the things people swap by text message, the music they swap

with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc which

those in authority fail to spot.

18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read
their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become

mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and econom-
ics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing
how to mess up hierarchies and see the various “revolutions” in their own
lives as part of an “exodus” from oppression, not - as previous generations

did - as a “diversion into the personal”. While Foucault could tell Gilles

Deleuze, “We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began

TWENTY REASONS WHY IT'S KICKING OFF EVERYWHERE

to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to

fully comprehend the nature of power,’ that’s probably changed.

1g. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest “meme”
that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly
less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s

and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of
excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of
centralized power and the demand for “autonomy” and personal freedom

in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based

power-elites.

20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the

iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of
the individual.

SOME COMPLICATIONS...

a) Allofthe above are generalisations, and have to be read as such.

b) Arethese methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point
they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their
values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also
we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever
seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network
off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters.

c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to
go online and foment pro-government “memes’ to counteract the opposi-
tional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website
that “ina dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form
of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation.”
But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world.
d) What happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up
against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where
the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out.

e) (and this one is troubling for mainstream politics) Are we creating
a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and
those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the
NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared
to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also
examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intel-
ligible “noise” - and this goes wider than just the protesters.

(For example: I’m finding it common among non-politicos these
days that whenever you mention the “Big Society” there’s a shrug and a
suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around
Westminster, it’s treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has
quickly become a “meme’ that crosses political tribal boundaries under
the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are deaf to “memes’ as the
youth are to the contents of Hansard.)

Article originally published at-http: //www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/
2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_its_kicking. html

Minor Compositions

Other titles in the series:
Precarious Rhapsody - Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Imaginal Machines - Stevphen Shukaitis

New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty
- Felix Guattari and Antonio Negri

The Occupation Cookbook

User's Guide to Demanding the Impossible
- Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Spectacular Capitalism - Richard Gilman-Opalsky
Markets Not Capitalism - Ed. Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson
Revolutions in Reverse - David Graeber
Undressing the Academy - University for Strategic Optimism
Communization & its Discontents - Ed. Benjamin Noys

19 & 20 - Colectivo Situaciones

Forthcoming:
El Martillo - Eclectic Electric Collective
A Very Careful Strike - Precarias a la Deriva
Punkademics - Ed. Zack Furness
The [Open] Utopia - Thomas More & Stephen Duncombe
Art, Production and Social Movement - Ed. Gavin Grindon
Hypothesis 891 - Colectivo Situaciones

Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of
Fragmentation - Neala Schleuning

As well as a multitude to come...

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